Bundled Links in Java

Link-bundling is the way to solve the problems arising from links in TWaver: when there are several links between two nodes, we can double-click one of them to bundle them and represent them with only a link-agent, hence the simplification visually.

There will appear the number of the links once they are bundled together. However, in so much link- bundles, how can we know that a particular number is of which link-bundle?

In fact, if you make some adjustment, you will see clearly how many links every link-bundle has on the network. For example, the sentence link.putLinkLabelRotatable(true); is used to rotate the label to be paralleled to the link-agent and the label of links can also be set to be placed in the middle. What’s more, the content to be shown in the label can also be edited by labelgenerator. For instance:

Before:

After:

In this way, the label is directly shown on the link to clearly divide up the links in the image above. The code is quite simple:

network.setElementLabelGenerator(new Generator(){
   public Object generate(Object object) {
    if (object instanceof Link) {
     Link link = (Link)object;
     if(link.isLinkBundleExpand()){
      return link.getName();
     }else if(link.isBundleAgent()){
      return "spring will come ("+link.getLinkBundleSize()+")"//
     }else{
      return null;
     }
    } else {
     return ((Element) object).getName();
    }
   }
  });

The functions on link-bundle provided in TWaver Java are listed as below:
Link：

isLinkBundleExpand() //to judge whether the links are bundled or not

isBundleAgent() // to judge whether a link is the agent-link or not

getLinkBundleSize() // to obtain the number of the links bundled together

getLinkBundleIndex // to obtain the index of a link in a link-bundle

setBundleExpand(boolean bundleExpand) //to set whether a link-bundle is expanded or not

putLinkBundleExpand  //to set whether the links are expanded or not

putLinkBundleIndex  //to set the index of a link in a link-bundle

putLinkBundleSize  //to set the number of the links bundled together

The functions related to bundle are also provided in DataBox:

setLinkBundleFilter(VisibleFilter linkBundleFilter) //to set the filter which filters out the links to be bundled: to specify which links are to be bundled and which are not

setLinkBundleAgentGenerator //This method is used to set the generator of link-agent in a link-bundle to change the default that a random link is specified as the agent-link in TWaver.

getBundledLinks(Node node1, Node node2) //to obtain the bundled links between two nodes