visual dependency display tool

October 13, 2008 2:30 PM

Does anyone know of a tool to graphically display dependencies on the web?

Basically, I want to be able to render an xml file of some database relationships in an intuitive and graphically appealing way. I would think that visio would have been able to do the trick but it does not seem to be able to.

I really would prefer to find an off the shelf version that I can just plug data into rather than writing my own if that is possible.

The display would be similar to http://www.visuwords.com/ or http://liveplasma.com/.
posted by GrumpyMonkey to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

You're looking for a web application to which you can upload some XML-formatted data and get back the URL of an image or page visualizing that data in some fashion, an image or page that will be hosted indefinitely for you on somebody else's server?

Or does the mention of Visio in your question imply that you are also open to non-web-based applications? If the latter, you might be able to use Graphviz to get what you need.
posted by letourneau at 2:53 PM on October 13, 2008

You can do this with Visio, but you need to write code using the Visio API. Check out the Visio SDK for examples of graph generation.

Other options are Graphviz as letourneau mentioned, yFiles, and, for flashier graphics, Ubigraph. However, you would need to write code for all these.

You won't be able to do this without writing code, unless your XML file already follows some standard schema for displaying graphs (such as GraphML). If it is, you're in luck; you can use programs like yEd to visualize GraphML files.
posted by lunchbox at 3:53 PM on October 13, 2008