G6 provides abundant Built-in Behavior. Besides, you can custom your type of behaviors to satisfy the special requirements.

In G6, we mainly take three scenarios into consideration:

• Demonstrating the relational data;
• Modeling the visualization;
• Analyzing the graph.

It is necessary to incorporate the interactions when the information is too complex to be understand in one glance:

• Zooming a large graph;
• Utilizing the ttoltip to show the detail information of a node;
• Adding/removing/modifying/querying a graph item.

Due to the complex and the diversity of the interactions in different scenarios and bussiness, we did not build all the interactions into G6:

• Some systems require to add nodes by clicking a tool bar, some require toe add by dragging from a panel;
• Some scenarios add edges by dragging from an anchor point, some add by clicking the end nodes;
• Some edges are allowed to link to any node, some only can be linked to specific anchor points;
• Some users require to custom the process of activating and endding.
• ...

We found the interactions are sundry and versatile. And the conflicts and configurations will make the users and developers collapse. Thus, G6 designs a set of simple and flexible implemention of interaction behavior.

The Life Cycle of Behavior

To customize a Behavior, it is important to comprehend the life cycle of Behavior. Interaction Behaviors are related to the events from users, including the processes:

• Bind the event;
• Activate the event;
• Keep the event;
• End the event;
• Remove the event.

registerBehavior

You can customize a Behavior by G6.registerBehavior. The following code implements a custom Behavior named 'activate-node', which changes the state active of the clicked node to be true, and restores the state active to be false when the user clicking the node again or clicking the canvas.

  ⚠️Attension:

• The following code set the states for different behaviors, but does not assign the state styles for manipulated nodes. To change the styles when the states changed, refer to State Styles.
• The configurations of customizing Behavior are introduced in Behavior API；
• getEvent returns the events which are listened by the Behavior. The events in G6 are introduced in Event API.

G6.registerBehavior('activate-node', {
  getDefaultCfg() {
    return {
      multiple: true
    };
  },
  getEvents() {
    return {
      'node:click': 'onNodeClick',
      'canvas:click': 'onCanvasClick'
    };
  }
  onNodeClick(e) {
    const graph = this.graph;
    const item = e.item;
    if (item.hasState('active')) {
      graph.setItemState(item, 'active', false);
      return;
    }
    // Get the configurations by this. If you do not allow multiple nodes to be 'active', cancel the 'active' state for other nodes
    if (!this.multiple) {
      this.removeNodesState();
    }
    // Set the 'active' state of the clicked node to be true
    graph.setItemState(item, 'active', true);
  },
  onCanvasClick(e) {
    // shouldUpdate can be rewrited by users. Returning true means turning the 'active' to be false for all the nodes
    if (this.shouldUpdate(e)) {
      removeNodesState();
    }
  },
  removeNodesState() {
    graph.findAllByState('node', 'active').forEach(node => {
        graph.setItemState(node, 'active', false);
      });
  }  
});

Using Behavior

Now, you have a type of Behavior named 'activate-node'. To use it, configure it into a mode of modes when instantiating a Graph. Mode. The following code configure the 'activate-node' into the default mode, which means the 'activate-node' Behavior will take effect in the default mode.

const graph = new G6.Graph({
  container: 'mountNode',
  width: 500,
  height: 500,
  modes: {
    // Configure the custom Behavior here to use it
    default: ['activate-node'],
  },
});