Tree Layout

Discover concepts, use cases, and practical customization of the tree layout

With yFiles' tree layout, organizational charts turn complex employee data into clear, interactive visuals, instantly showing reporting lines and company structure. The automatic layout handles even intricate hierarchies and matrix teams, ensuring charts stay clear and actionable for workforce planning, onboarding, and communication.

Tree layout visualization transforms complex, nested file systems into clear, navigable diagrams. By displaying the entire directory hierarchy at once, tree layouts make it easier to understand and manage folder structures, avoid unnecessary drilling down, and quickly locate files.

This approach naturally represents the one-to-many relationships in file systems, helping users navigate even deep or complicated directories efficiently. yFiles enables instant, interactive visualization of directory structures, streamlining navigation and comprehension of complex file systems.

Decision trees and risk modeling are key areas where yFiles excels by turning complex analyses into clear visual structures. Visualizing decision points, outcomes, and probability paths helps stakeholders intuitively trace scenarios and understand how choices impact results.

Tree visualization reveals connections between decisions, enabling strategic teams to compare risks and see how early choices affect later options. This makes probability and risk more understandable and easier to communicate.

Interactive decision systems use yFiles to let users navigate complex choices dynamically. For example, in medical diagnosis, doctors interactively explore symptoms, test results, and treatments, with each choice updating visible options in real time.

yFiles enables this by instantly updating layouts and highlighting relevant paths, making complex decision trees clear and focused. This is especially useful in scenarios where early choices impact later options, such as insurance claims or loan approvals.

Genealogical trees are a natural fit for tree visualization. With yFiles, complex family histories become interactive, easy-to-navigate maps. Users can explore generations, follow specific branches, and maintain context of the full family structure.

yFiles supports complex relationships—such as adoptions and multiple marriages—while keeping large family trees readable and interactive, making it simple to trace lineages and uncover ancestral connections.

yFiles tree layout can help understanding technical dependencies in large software projects. Unlike package managers that present dependencies as lists, yFiles reveals relationships, such as how libraries branch into modules and where conflicts may occur.

Its interactive features allow developers to explore system hierarchies and understand how changes affect the overall architecture, making it especially useful during refactoring or dependency updates.

Mindmaps help organize complex ideas by branching topics outward from a central concept. With yFiles’ tree layout, mindmaps are easy to create and explore. This makes them ideal for brainstorming, project planning, or organizing information during workshops.

yFiles ensures that even large mindmaps remain clear and visually engaging, with smart spacing and interactive features that let users add, reorganize, or collapse topics on the fly.

Tree layout begins with root identification and structure analysis, the foundational stage that determines how hierarchical data will be organized and displayed. This process involves detecting the root node, validating that the data forms a proper tree structure without cycles, mapping parent-child relationships, and calculating the depth of various branches to understand the overall hierarchy scope.

yFiles handles this analysis automatically, detecting complex scenarios like identifying problematic data relationships that would break tree layout assumptions.

The tree layout uses layer-based positioning to organize nodes into distinct levels. It starts placing the leaf nodes with the largest distance to the root node (Layer 5 in example graph). It does this for all subtrees of the graph recursively until it reaches the root node.

The framework automatically adjusts spacing based on node content, wider component names receive more space, while tightly related modules are positioned closer together. When the hierarchy becomes dense, overlap prevention algorithms dynamically increase spacing or suggest alternative layout orientations to maintain readability throughout the entire system visualization.

Edge routing shapes how connections are drawn in tree diagrams, impacting clarity and readability.

The system automatically avoids overlaps and crossing through nodes, dynamically rerouting edges to keep even crowded family trees organized and easy to follow.

The incremental layout feature in yFiles (referred to as "from-sketch mode" in the API) integrates new or modified nodes and edges into your existing diagram by adapting the layout intelligently. While the positions of unchanged elements are not guaranteed to stay fixed, the algorithm aims to retain as much of the original drawing as possible, helping to preserve context and provide stable, clear visualizations as your graph evolves.

Incremental layout is ideal for applications where changes occur dynamically or in real time, such as editing workflows, expanding trees, or visualizing live data. With yFiles, you can enable this mode to provide seamless, responsive updates as your users interact with the graph.