Freshly opened diagramm is deflated

[glsp-bot]

When I open an ecore file in the browser all elements are crumbled in the upper left corner. Is this right now an expected behaviour or shouldn't it be doing that?

original thread by Jonas Ebel

[glsp-bot]

[Jonas Ebel]

https://spectrum.imgix.net/threads/e7a15d77-cb9b-4836-a7c1-35c040775fc8/35a731cb-8fc9-46c3-8f76-70805b44f33b-image.png?expires=1629331200000&ixlib=js-1.3.0&s=38bc7df0263fa588a78d9ad2195820f3

[tortmayr]

This is the expected behavior. Freshly created diagrams do not get automatically layouted. However you can trigger a layout command via the 'Diagram' menu or by using the keyboard shortcut 'alt+L'

[glsp-bot]

[Jonas Helming]

@tortmayr : Thank you for the clarification? Is there a reason, why we do not auto layout diagrams, which have been auto generated?

[tortmayr]

Currently there is no way to distinguish between newly generated and existing diagrams on server side. We only could do auto-layout on open and this would revert all layout changes that the user did manually.

[eneufeld]

@tortmayr can't the user trigger a layout when creating the diagram? eg using the elk framework?

[glsp-bot]

[Jonas Helming]

I agree, either that, or we put in some marker to indicate that the diagram has been auto generated. I like Eugens suggestion more. Anyways, do I understand correctly, that there is not conceptional reason to not do this, but we need to just solve the issue to not override user specific layout? I would then consider this feature to be a huge improvement.

[tortmayr]

Yes that's correct. We can add the feature to the backlog.

[glsp-bot]

[Jonas Helming]

@jonas-ebel : Could you report that in the ecore-glsp repository as a feature request and post the link here?

[glsp-bot]

[Jonas Ebel]

@eneufeld can you give me a hint where to read about the elk framework - googling only gives me the ELK stack.. Is that what you meant?

[tortmayr]

@jonas-ebel Documentation about the Eclipse Layout Kernel (ELK) can be found here: https://www.eclipse.org/elk/. A concrete example of an layouter based on ELK can be found in the ecore-glsp server component (server/src/main/java/com/eclipsesource/glsp/ecore/EcoreLayoutEngine.java)

[glsp-bot]

[Jonas Ebel]

I added above into following issue to ecore-glsp

[glsp-bot]

[Jonas Ebel]

eclipsesource/ecore-glsp#47

[glsp-bot]

[Jonas Helming]

@jonas-ebel Is there a link missing?

[glsp-bot]

[Jonas Ebel]

You mean the link to the issue?

[glsp-bot]

[Jonas Ebel]

I was trying to specify the occurence of this issue in more detail.
Basically if there exists no enotation file for a specific diagramm, ecore cannot determine the layout. Also a user specific layouting cannot exist yet (as it would have needed to be saved in an enotation file at that point).
So I'd suggest to automatically layout any diagram using the EcoreLayoutEngine, when opening a diagram, which has no enotation file.
What do you think?

Follow up question would be if this newly layouted diagram should be save (i.e. written to enotation on the disk) on opening.

[tortmayr]

That sounds like a good solution for this problem. For the follow up question: I don't think its necessary to save after the autolayouting. If the diagram is closed without saving it will just be autolayouted again the next time (because the enotation file is still missing).