GraphvizPlugin or DirectedGraphPlugin

Both DirectedGraphPlugin and GraphvizPlugin seems to provide the same feature - a graphs visualization using "The dot Language".

What is the difference between them?

Why maintain both of them?

Which should I use?

-- MateuszKDzior - 09 Oct 2015

GraphvizPlugin is a rewrite of DirectedGraphPlugin. I tried to fix the latter and had to give up to to its internal wrinkles that I wasn't able to untangle. There are a couple of problems in DGP that are solved in GP. The main issue I had was the way DGP stored generated images attaching them to unexpected topics thus polluting their change sets. Another one was utf8. Another one was proper of SVG. Another one was implementing a proper %GRAPHVIZ macro instead of having an xml tag only. This considerably adds more flexibility when generating dot graphs automatically as part of a wiki app. Nother difference is that GraphvizPlugin can read nodes and edges from a TML table rather than having to always code it in dot language. That way it can take definitions of WorkflowPlugin and generate a flow chart out of the box.

-- MichaelDaum - 11 Oct 2015

Thank you for response. Does it mean that DirectedGraphPlugin will be abandoned, so that I should rewrite all topics to use GraphvizPlugin.

-- MateuszKDzior - 12 Oct 2015

A lot of people are using DGP, sure. Yet still I think this plugin is particularly badly coded to a point I considered it unfixable. Replacing DGP with GP should actually be straight forward.

-- MichaelDaum - 12 Oct 2015