Flexible Architecture

Essential Diagram is designed to be a high performance, modular, easy to use and easy to customize engine. Many of the classes and components in the library can be subclassed, providing users the ability to extend and customize the library to meet their needs.

Model-View-Controller	Styles and Property Inheritance
Export Options

Graphical Objects

Essential Diagram provides you all the primitive Shapes to let you come up with Symbols more reflective of your business needs.

Shapes	Symbols
Labels	Text Nodes
Nodes With Hosted Controls

Node Linking

Essential Diagram comes with built-in shapes that let you link your diagram nodes illustrating the work flow.

Links	Ports
End Point Decorators	Line Routing and Line Bridging

Diagram Appearance

There are plenty of options to customize the look and feel of the different portions of a diagram to let you create professional looking diagrams that reflect the style patterns commonly used in your business domain.

Node Fill Styles	Diagram Background
Line Styles	FontColor Styles
Layers

User Interface Features

Essential Diagram comes with advanced user-interface features to provide your end users a rich visualization experience.

Zooming and Panning

Rulers

Layout Management

Essential Diagram provides a default implementation for all the common layout patterns. It also lets you easily customize existing and implement brand new layouting techniques.

Directed Tree Layout Manager	Radial Tree Layout Manager
Table Tree Layout Manager	Symmetric Layout Manager
Hierarchic Layout Manager	Custom Layout Manager

Diagram Builder Mode

Essential Diagram can be used to create a rich Visio like Diagram Builder application. This framework provides a whole bunch of utility controls to help you put such an application togather, very easily.

Document Explorer	Property Editor
Pan And Zoom View	Layout Grid
Undo Redo	Serialization

Drawing Tools

There are several built-in drawing tools that let your users add primitive shapes and lines to the diagram. This just makes it easier to put togather a rich Diagram Building Environment.

Line	Polyline
Rectangle	Rounded Rectangle
Ellipse	Polygon
Curve	Closed Curve
Spline	Bezier
Text	Rich Text
Image

Editing Tools

Essential Diagram comes with a number of editing tools that allow users to work interactively with the Diagram Control usually in the context of Diagram Building applications. Besides a slew of built-in tools, custom tools providing custom functionality can easily be defined and added to the diagram controller.

Select Tool	Align Tools
Layout Tools	Nudge Tools
ZOrder Tools	Rotate Tools
View Tools	Text Formatting Tools

Custom Symbols

Custom Symbols can be easily created using the Symbol Designer Utility. Such symbols can then be added to the Symbol Palette in a Diagram Builder Application or simply be reused in diagrams you might create programatically.

Symbol Designer Utility

Visio Stencil Import

Essential Diagram Scripting

Essential Diagram is integrated with the Essential Scripting Library to support diagram creation with scriptable interactivity. The framework also provides enhanced design-time support through a rich user interface for creating, and editing scripts. The scripting feature allows end users to define behaviors for diagram entities at runtime using one of the supported scripting languages. The scripting languages currently supported are C#, Visual Basic .NET and JScript .NET.

Scripting Editor

Scripting ToolBar