Beautiful-Tree

Beautiful-Tree is a lightweight & flexible library to draw trees as SVG images.

Some of its hightlights:

• It is compatible with ESM, CJS, UMD and IIFE
• Very lightweight (3.9Kb in its minimised ESM form, and 4.2Kb in its UMD form)
• The generated trees can be styled with CSS

Other members of the family

This is the "React variant" of the BeautifulTree library. If you are looking for integration with other technologies such as Vue, check the main README.md file of the project's repository.

Install

# With NPM
npm install @beautiful-tree/react

# With Yarn
yarn add @beautiful-tree/react

# With PNPM
pnpm add @beautiful-tree/react

Basic Usage

import { BeautifulTree } from '@beautiful-tree/react'

const tree = {
	data: { v: 'A' },
	children: [
		{
			node: {
				/* node data can contain any kews we want */
				data: { v: 'B' },
				children: [
					{
						/* we can annotate edges with arbitrary metadata */
						eData: { e: 0.5 },
						node: { data: { v: 'C' } }
					},
				],
			},
		},
		{
			node: {
				data: { v: 'D' },
				children: [
					{ node: { data: { v: 'E' } } },
					{ node: { data: { v: 'F' } } },
				],
			},
		},
	],
}

// The 3 main properties that we must always set are:
// - `id`: the id for the tree component
// - `tree:`` the tree data structure that will be rendered
// - `svgProps``: the proportions of the SVG "canvas".
render(
	<BeautifulTree
			id={'my-tree'}
			tree={tree}
			svgProps={{
					width: 400,
					height: 400,
					// sizeUnit?: '%' | 'em' | 'px' | 'rem'
			}}
	/>
)

Exposed CSS classes

• beautiful-tree-react: applies to the rendered SVG element.
• beautiful-tree-edge: applies to all the rendered edges inside the SVG element.
• beautiful-tree-node: applies to all the rendered nodes inside the SVG element.
• beautiful-tree-root: applies only to the rendered root node.
• beautiful-tree-leaf: applies to all the rendered leaf nodes inside the SVG element.
• beautiful-tree-node-content: applies to all the <div> elements rendered inside nodes when using the getNodeContent prop.

Other component props

We won't go into very deep details because TypeScript's autocomplete is enough to discover the aspects not mentioned here.

nodeShape

Accepted values are 'circle' and 'rect'. It specifies which shape is used to render the tree nodes.

getNodeShape

In case we want the shape of each node to depend on their associated metadata, we can pass a function that returns the desired shape for each individual node.

getNodeContent

We can pass a function to read what's inside the data property of each node and return either a string value or a JSX.Element object that will be rendered inside the corresponding node.

computeLayout

It specifies the function that is used to compute the tree layout.

• By default it uses computeSmartLayout.
• But we can also import a simpler layout computeNaiveLayout.

getNodeClass

We can pass a function that takes each node object and returns a list of CSS classes that will be applied to it. This is useful if we want to make node styles depend on their associated data.

getEdgeClass

We can pass a function that takes edge metadata as input and returns a list of CSS classes that will be applied to it. This is useful if we want to make edge styles depend on their associated data.

hCoef

This parameter, mostly useful for the case when node's shape is 'rect', allows us to control the ratio aspect between height and width of a node. It must be between 0 and 1, ideally above 0.5.

Future Plans

• Introduce a layout algorithm for dendrograms (with leafs all at the bottom level, instead of being at the level inmediately below their parents).
• Introduce rotated versions of the tree layout (left-to-right, right-to-left, bottom-up)
• Allow to use different edge "styles" between nodes (now it's just straight lines): splines, segmented lines with corners...
• Release versions of this same library for other components systems, such as Vue, Svelte, Solidjs, and native Web Components.