Forum OpenACS Development: Flow chart generation with drag and drop functionality

1. Create a flow chart that shows the relationship between various user defined elements that will already be modeled in the OACS database.
2. Click on the element or relationship to edit its properties.
3. Drag and drop and element to change its place in the tree.

You could use flash or java to make something better suited, but that's a lot of hazzle. Most ideal would be a desktop application. But that does not fit in well with the webbased application idea.

The direction I'm now thinking in is the use of 'starkits' - gives you the benefit of both worlds:

a) not being hindered by the inherent limitations of webpages (it's just a normal windows/x-windows application)
b) almost as easy to use as a regular webpage (for the user)

The idea then is:
- the user has downloaded a suitable TclKit for his platform (1mb download, just once)
- and when he clicks on the link to e.g. edit the gantchart, he gets downloaded a suitable starkit (instead of an HTML page). The kit is probably around the same size as a page with images. After editing (no roundtrips to the server!) the kit uploads the edited chart back to the server and terminates.

I haven't done anything in this direction yet, but I thought it may be worthwhile sharing the thought.

In case you're never heard of tclkit/starkits:
- about starkits: http://www.equi4.com/starkit.html
- about tclkit: http://www.equi4.com/tclkit.html
- the starkit archive: http://mini.net/sdarchive

If you mount the latest copy of GForge (www.gforge.org), you can see it in action, creating Gannt Charts on the fly (http://gforge.org/pm/task.php?group_id=5&group_project_id=2&func=ganttpage).

As for Caroline's requirement, have you tried checking out Dia? (http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/)

http://rubick.com:8002/openacs/graphing

If you have any notes or additions to make to that page, let me know.