elk VS dagre

Graphviz is the classic option but unfortunately it isn't very good. I mean it was great when it was written in the 80s or whatever but then it seems like it was declared "done" and is still stuck in the 80s.

Quite annoying because it totally dominates the mindshare of graph layout tools, making it difficult to find alternatives.

Here's some other options anyway:

* Eclipse Layout Kernel: https://github.com/eclipse/elk

* OGDF: https://ogdf.uos.de/

In fairness both their websites are pretty terrible (would some examples kill you OGDF?) and they don't provide an easy way to try them out, so I guess it's not that surprising that Graphviz dominates.

Anyway in practice if you have a complex graph then doing it manually is by far the best option.

If it's too big to do manually then it's unlikely to be a useful graph in the first place.

The issue I have with a lot of these tools is they work fine when depicting relationships between tables in the same schema (talking mainly about PostgreSQL databases), but few support showing relationships between tables across different schemas.

Also, when the number of tables grows large, few have layouts arranged in an optimal way. I use D2 (https://d2lang.com/) to create ERDs. However, of the free layout engines available in D2, Dagre (https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre) and ELK (https://github.com/eclipse/elk) both don't have optimal placement of layouts for a sufficiently complicated database.

It was unmaintained for a long time (maybe considered done implementing the algorithm it set out to), but recently a Google engineer has revived it: https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre

The issue I have with a lot of these tools is they work fine when depicting relationships between tables in the same schema (talking mainly about PostgreSQL databases), but few support showing relationships between tables across different schemas.

Also, when the number of tables grows large, few have layouts arranged in an optimal way. I use D2 (https://d2lang.com/) to create ERDs. However, of the free layout engines available in D2, Dagre (https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre) and ELK (https://github.com/eclipse/elk) both don't have optimal placement of layouts for a sufficiently complicated database.

You are right, after a bit of searching found nice library: https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre and couple of others. Maybe will try it out.

I am using ReactFlow with Dagre to create reasonably simple graph flows as the following example:

Hello,

I've been researching layered graph algorithms, but it appears that this market is mostly inactive at the moment.

Dagre (https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre) is considered outdated, with a codebase from 2015 that is no longer being updated, although they still accept some pull requests.

KLAY (https://github.com/kieler/klayjs) has been succeeded by ELK, and development stopped in 2016.

ELK (https://github.com/kieler/elkjs) is currently being developed by the KIELER Project, mostly by students and professors, written in Java. They are doing a great job, but the library is written in Java and then transpiled to JavaScript. They also rely on students for help with the development, which makes progress slow.

Do you happen to know of any new projects that are actively addressing this problem?

dagrejs has a section on "Recommended Reading" which lists which algorithms from which papers they implement.

https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre/wiki#recommended-reading

Terrastruct engineer here. The visualization will be open source though I can't say for sure yet whether it'll be with our layout algorithm or with https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre.

Another option is Dagre which is apparently now abandoned.