Creating graphs automatically from imported data
 

Hi,

I've had a quick browse around the Omnigraffle documentation and I'm still not quite sure of how possible this is.

I have a MySQL database in which is stored a largish 'topic tree' or subject taxonomy. To explain, the node 'vehicles' might contain subcategories 'land-based' and 'with wings'. Land-based might subsequently divide into 'human powered' and 'motorised'. You get the idea.

Now what I want to do is to be able to dump this data from the database (I assume a direct connection to the DB is not possible) and then import the data into Omnigraffle to automagically create a visually appealing chart illustrating the hierarchy.

I'm willing to manually tweak here and there to make it look maximally groovy.

1. Does that sound plausible?
2. What format would Omnigraffle need to do the job?
3. Any other considerations?

Many thanks for your help in advance.

I think the easiest format to use would be .dot, you can find out more about the format at Graphviz.org.

Hope that helps,

Having looked at the initial .dot documentation I nearly ran away screaming, but I subsequently worked out the very minimal syntax needed to describe the relationship between nodes, without formatting. Et voila my first hand-coded .dot imported into Omnigraffle without a hitch.

So thanks for the heads-up, very useful.