A git-workflow flowchart rendered with no overlaps but read poorly. Three
distinct causes, each fixed and measured:
1. Edge labels sat on boxes and on each other (4 collisions on the
reported diagram; 280 across 250 generated flowcharts). The router
keeps LINES off the boxes but a label renders at its edge's midpoint,
which on a long edge is beside exactly the things the line was routed
around. placeLabels slides each label along its own edge to a clear
spot — longest edges first, midpoint-outward tries — written as the
geometry's relative x, which draw.io natively supports. Corpus: 280
label collisions -> 8.
2. A->B and B->A were routed independently, so "git add" ran straight
while "git reset" wandered through a different corridor with a kink.
Opposite edges that agree on axis now get two absolute parallel tracks
in the strip where the two boxes overlap, a constant 24px apart,
converted back to port fractions. Zero crossing regressions.
3. All boxes rendered the same white, because the render layer's
fill/stroke support was never reachable: neither add_box's schema nor
draw_graph's nodes exposed it. Rather than exposing raw hex (the model
picks mismatched saturations, differently every time), nodes take a
semantic group name and the engine maps groups to a fixed palette of
six paired fill/strokes in order of first appearance. The model names
the zones - remote vs local vs temp - and never touches a colour.
532 unit tests pass; the 5 diagram e2e tests pass in a real browser.
Four reviewers went over the previous commit (three Claude, one Codex). Their
findings, verified independently before applying:
A REAL BUG. A vertical pool with milestone labels drew the label strip outside
the pool frame. The measure pass reserves width as padding + content + strip with
no gap between the last two; the renderer placed the strip one gap further out.
No test caught it because every vertical case omitted phases and every phases
case was horizontal — both regression cases added.
Duplicated logic, now single-sourced:
- messageCount existed byte-identically in layout.ts and render.ts. Two copies
that had to agree or the lifelines stop reaching the last message.
- sequenceMetrics was called twice per sequence container, once inside the
chrome builder and again for the message positions. Same drift hazard, in the
file whose own comment warns about it.
Dead code, each verified unreachable rather than assumed:
- Placed.extent: declared and documented, never written or read. Every .extent
access belongs to RadialTree.
- SequenceMetrics.top: computed, returned, no reader.
- spread()'s level parameter: threaded through the recursion, never used.
- radialReach's .slice(0, generations): widestPerLevel writes one entry per
generation, so its length IS the depth. Confirmed over 20,000 random trees;
removing it made RadialTree.depth dead too.
- Two of three cycle guards in radialHierarchy: self-links are already skipped
when the parent map is built, and that map holds one parent per node, so the
structure is a forest and the visited-set filter cannot fire. The rootOf
guard does fire and stays.
- GraphOptions.layerGap/nodeGap/idPrefix: no caller, not in the tool schema.
Simplifications:
- LayoutContext wrapped a single field; the link array now passes directly,
which also removes the NO_CONTEXT default no call site ever took.
- stretches() and the mirror-image check five lines below it expressed one rule
two ways; unified, with the rationale stated once.
- hasStencilFrame/isDirectional: one caller each, and isDirectional's name
contradicted its body, which the guarded branch then re-discriminated anyway.
- poolFrameStyle() took no arguments and had one caller.
- poolCellOf clamped a value already clamped at the model boundary and
unreachable-by-construction from the parser.
- A comment on stampPoolDecoration described container behaviour the function
does not implement.
Kept deliberately, with evidence:
- The best-arrangement tracking in the crossing reducer. Two reviewers
suspected it was dead weight. Measured: barycentre sweeping regressed below
its own running best in 180 of 500 random graphs, so without it a third of
flowcharts would keep a worse arrangement than one already found.
- Vertical pools. Two reviewers recommended deleting the feature as
undiscoverable. The bug was one line, and vertical swimlanes are a real
convention — documented to the model instead, which is what was actually
missing.
- styleValue duplicating readMarker, isLeaf, findPageIndex: all genuinely
redundant, all predating this branch. Left alone to keep the diff scoped.
525 unit tests and 11 diagram e2e tests pass.
Extends the declarative engine past cloud architecture. The tool routing was
divided by icon library — AWS through the engine, everything else hand-written
XML — which is the wrong axis. What matters is the LAYOUT SHAPE.
Measured first: a six-step approval flow declared in its natural order comes out
as one column, because the layout only arranges what nesting tells it to and
never looked at the arrows. That forces the arrow from the decision to its second
branch to jump over the first branch.
graph.ts computes what the layout should have looked at: layer assignment by
longest path, cycle breaking so a loop is drawn without setting the order, and
barycentre sweeping to cut edge crossings. It emits ordinary container
operations, so layout, routing and round-tripping are unchanged — reaching zero
arrows-through-boxes on a 14-node pipeline and zero crossings on a bipartite
graph whose declared order forces three.
Three new container kinds, each because one layout rule cannot serve them all:
pool — swimlanes. Lanes are real cells and each step is parented to its
band, so dragging a step to another role records the change.
sequence — participants across the top, one lifeline cell per participant so
head and line stay together on a drag. Messages bypass the router:
a message's height IS its order.
radial — mind maps and org charts. Children are a flat list and the
hierarchy comes from the links, because a branch is a box and a box
cannot hold children.
Flowchart box shapes (diamond, stadium, parallelogram, document) so a reader can
tell a branch from a step.
Two bugs the new tests caught: the duplicate-link guard blocked a sequence
diagram from having two messages between the same pair, and the fallback message
numbering was shared across containers, pushing a second diagram's messages off
its own lifelines.
523 unit tests and 17 diagram e2e tests pass. Every kind verified round-trip
stable to a fixed point, and rendered in a real browser — draw.io keeps the
lifeline shape and the lane markers.
