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Introduction

The ForceSimulation class is the heart of the force-directed graph simulation. It is responsible for rendering and updated the visualization of nodes and links. To achieve this, it uses d3's force-simulation under the hood and appends further features and an enhanced API.

More detailed infromation about the specific features are available on the following pages.

Setup

To use the force simulation within a project you need to import the ForceSimulation class from graphly-d3. Instantiate a new ForceSimulation and pass it the <svg> DOM element you want to render the graph in.

You will also want to import the style.css from the graphly-d3 package. This provides the necessary styles for the graph visualization.

To render a graph you need to call the render() method of the ForceSimulation instance and pass the graph object as an argument. The graph needs to meed the required format with nodes and links.

js
import { ForceSimulation } from "@livereader/graphly-d3";
import "@livereader/graphly-d3/style.css";

const graph = {
	nodes: [...],
	links: [...],
};

const svg = document.getElementById("mySVG");
const simulation = new ForceSimulation(svg);

simulation.render(graph);

Graphly D3 Documentation