DGML

DGML is an XML-based file format for directed graphs.

Introduction to DGML

Here is what a simple directed graph with three nodes and two links between them looks like

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<DirectedGraph xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/vs/2009/dgml">
  <Nodes>
    <Node Id="a" Label="a" Size="10" />
    <Node Id="b" Background="#FF008080" Label="b" />
    <Node Id="c" Label="c" Start="2010-06-10" />
  </Nodes>
  <Links>
    <Link Source="a" Target="b" />
    <Link Source="a" Target="c" />
  </Links>
  <Properties>
    <Property Id="Background" Label="Background" DataType="Brush" />
    <Property Id="Label" Label="Label" DataType="String" />
    <Property Id="Size" DataType="String" />
    <Property Id="Start" DataType="DateTime" />
  </Properties>
</DirectedGraph>

which looks like this:

The complete XSD schema for DGML is available at [1]. DGML not only allows describing nodes and links in a graph, but also annotating those nodes and links with any user defined property and/or category.

Applications supporting DGML

• Visual Studio 2010, a suite of tools for Software Developers including support for generating DGML graphs from relationships in code and for viewing any DGML document generated by any other tool.

See also

• XML
• GraphML, an XML format for graphs
• GXL, graph exchange format based on XML -- GXL
• GML is another widely used graph exchange format. -- GML
• Dot Language, a format for describing graphs and their presentation, for the Graphviz set of tools.

External links

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio homepage of Visual Studio
• http://schemas.microsoft.com/vs/2009/dgml page describing the XSD schema for DGML
• http://www.lovettsoftware.com contains videos showing how to use DGML graphs in Visual Studio
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409365.aspx, documentation on how to use DGML