aframe-graph

Overview

A set of A-Frame components that can be used to build a graph of nodes & edges

Current focus is on tracking changes to the components (sets of connected nodes) that make up the graph. May be extended to other applications of graphs in future.

graph

Top-level component set on the a-scene to set properties of the graph. Currently just controls debug display

graph-node

Set this component on an entity that you want to appear as a node in the graph

graph-edge

Set this component on an entity that is a node in the graph, to connect it via an edge to another node. A node can have multiple edges, and can even have multiple edges to the same remote node.

Schemas

graph

Property	Description	Default
debug	Draw lines to represent edges between nodes	false

graph-node

This component has no properties

graph-edge

Property	Description	Default
target	A selector for the entity to connect the edge to. Both entities must have the graph-nodecomponent set on them. Edges are undirected.	none

Events

The following events are emitted by the edge component when it is added or removed, and that results in a change to the connected components in the graph.

Event	Description
graph-components-joined	Two components in the graph have been joined together into a single component.
graph-components-split	A component in the graph has been split into two components.

Each event includes additional detail as follows:

Property	Description
otherNode	The entity at the far end of the edge that was added / removed to trigger the event
thisComponent	An array of Object3D UUIDs for the nodes in the component that this node is a member of.
otherComponent	An array of Object3D UUIDs for the nodes in the component that the node at the other end of the added / removed edge is a member of.

For the joined event, the data in thisComponent & otherComponent represents the state before the join. For the split event, it represents the state after the split event.

The state after the join event, or before the split event can be generated from this data by concatenating the two arrays.

Mapping Object3D UUIDs back to node entities is the responsibility of the application handling the events. One option is to maintain a scene-level object with Object3D UUIDs as keys that map back to the node entities, as done in this example.

Installation

Via CDN

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/aframe-graph@0.0.1/index.min.js"></script>

Or via npm

npm install aframe-graph

Examples

A simple example that builds a graph between 4 nodes:

    <a-scene background="color:black" graph="debug: true">

      <a-entity id="container" position = "0 0 -4">
        <a-box id="box1" position="-1 1 0"color="red"
               graph-node
               graph-edge__2="target:#box2"
               graph-edge__3="target:#box3">
        </a-box>
        <a-box id="box2" position="1 1 0"color="green"
               graph-node
               graph-edge__1="target:#box1"
               graph-edge__3="target:#box3">
        </a-box>
        <a-box id="box3" position="-1 3 0"color="blue"
               graph-node
               graph-edge__1="target:#box1"
               graph-edge__4="target:#box4">
        </a-box>
        <a-box id="box4" position="1 3 0"color="yellow"
               graph-node
               graph-edge__1="target:#box1">
        </a-box>
      </a-entity>
    </a-scene>

View the example here.

A more complicated example, showing dynamic addition /removal of edges, and component detection can be seen here.

Code

graph