Connection touches or crosses shape or connection

AUTHOR: Marin Bratanov

DATE POSTED: October 15, 2018

PROBLEM

Diagram connections cross or touch shapes or other connections.

DESCRIPTION

In some cases (the more complex the diagram, the higher chance of this manifesting), one or more connections may touch or even cross a shape, and/or another connection.

RadDiagram does not consider this behavior a bug or a problem and it cannot be completely avoided. The Solution section below offers a few ideas you can try to minimize it, however.

SOLUTION

You can find listed here some explanations and a few ideas that may help you configure the diagram so that connections cross or touch shapes more rarely.

• Increase the separation between the diagram nodes. These are mostly the HorizontalSeparation and VerticalSeparation properties under LayoutSettings. Depending on the layout, the NodeDistance and RadialSeparation are also available.
• The way shapes and connections are laid out depends on the algorithm that is used. Some algorithms (like the Layered layout) work best with few diagram items and so having many items is more likely to cause issues. So, you can try a different algorithm (Layout).
• Try the Cascading style of connections by setting ConnectionDefaultsSettings.Type to Cascading.
• Use the Auto connectors whenever possible by setting ConnectionDefaultsSettings.FromConnector and ConnectionDefaultsSettings.ToConnector to Auto.
• Increase the number of Iterations of the algorithm over the data (defaults to 300 and comes with some performance cost).