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Exporting Bigraphs as Images

The framework provides simple means to graphically display bigraphs and export them as *.svg or *.png.

Therefore, graphic exporters are available for different kind of models:

  • Exporter for bigraph models (including rules and predicates)
  • Exporter for reaction graphs (i.e., the transition system of a BRS)
  • Exporter to ranked graph representation of bigraphs
tip

Each graphics exporter accepts so-called graphical feature suppliers that are able to change the visual appearance of the exported image. Therefore, one has to call the method BigraphGraphicsExporter<T>#with(GraphicalFeatureSupplier<V>) to add graphical suppliers to a concrete graphics exporter. This is described here.

Internally, the graphviz-java library is used. Bigraphs are constructed using this library and converted as a graphics file afterwards. This allows to export the corresponding DOT file at any time. Other exporters rely on the JGraphT library.

Visualizing Pure Bigraphs​

Export as PNG File​

PureBigraph bigraph = ...;
String convert = BigraphGraphvizExporter.toPNG(bigraph,
        true,
        new File("bigraph-exported.png")
);

The return value outputs the bigraph in the DOT format.

The second parameter allows to export the bigraph as a tree-format (flag must be set to true) or in the containment-format (flag must be set to false). The difference is shown below.

As TreeAs Containment
bigraph-treebigraph-containment

Export as DOT File​

Same as above but without exporting the bigraph to the filesystem:

PureBigraph bigraph = ...;
String converted = BigraphGraphvizExporter.toDOT(bigraph, true);

The value of converted is:

graph "Bigraph" {
 graph ["rankdir"="BT"]
 "Job_v4" ["color"="black","shape"="rectangle"]
 "Computer_v2" ["color"="black","shape"="rectangle"]
 "Room_v0" ["color"="black","shape"="rectangle"]
 "r_0" ["fontcolor"="black","style"="setlinewidth(1)","shape"="ellipse"]
 "User_v1" ["color"="black","shape"="rectangle"]
 "Job_v3" ["color"="black","shape"="rectangle"]
 {
 graph ["rank"="same"]
 "r_0"
 }
 {
 graph ["rank"="same"]
 "Room_v0"
 }
 {
 graph ["rank"="same"]
 "User_v1"
 "Computer_v2"
 }
 {
 graph ["rank"="same"]
 "Job_v4"
 "Job_v3"
 }
 {
 graph ["rank"="source"]
 }
 {
 graph ["rank"="sink"]
 }
 "Job_v4" -- "Computer_v2" ["label"=""]
 "Computer_v2" -- "Room_v0" ["label"=""]
 "Room_v0" -- "r_0" ["label"=""]
 "User_v1" -- "Room_v0" ["label"=""]
 "Job_v3" -- "Computer_v2" ["label"=""]
 }

Visualizing Ranked Graphs​

As described in Section "Ranked Graphs", a bigraph can be casted to a ranked graph. The visualization module also provides support to export a ranked graphs as a diagram as follows:

PureBigraph bigraph = ...;
PureBigraphRankedGraphEncoding graphEncoding = new PureBigraphRankedGraphEncoding(bigraph);
new BigraphRankedGraphExporter().toPNG(graphEncoding, new File("ranked-graph.png"));

An example is shown below.

imgs