I am having a lot of trouble with the tree layouts. I finally decided to use the DirectedTreeLayout because when a new node is added the HierarchicalTreeLayout messes the whole layout, switching from Left to right, so some pseudo right to left approach, and half of my nodes are on top of each other. With the DirectedTreeLayout it seems to work correctly for the most part. My Root node is on the left and the children are branch out towards to right, and are all spaced appropriately.
However, I started to have trouble when I was looking at the case where a particular node might have multiple parents. The layout is much the same as it was before, except that there is a connector that crosses over other nodes to reach its other parent. I didn't like that too much. So because of my particular hierarchy of objects, I though I could make use of the Level field to adjust the layout slightly.
I have attached a picture of a simple example of what I was trying to do. The first image is what happens, and the second is what I was expecting to see. Each letter represents a different type of object. I was assuming that this would simplify the layout for more complex examples so that it would prevent connection lines from crossing all over my nodes.
However, it would seem that assigning Levels doesn't seem to have any effect whatsoever on where the nodes are placed. Other than individually placing each node at a specific pixel, which I REALLY didn't want to start getting into, what can I do?
Part of the reason I don't want to place the nodes myself, is that it is possible going forward that I want my nodes to be of different sizes (depending on the types and the contents), and I was hoping the automatic layout would do the heavy lifting. It is looking more and more like the layout is not going to help me.
11142013_73749_PM_d72ae00f.zip