Which ASP.NET Diagramming Library/Control do you Recommend?

Question

I'm looking for an ASP.NET library or control (preferably in C#) to create workflow diagrams from business processes.

Edit: To clarify, the necessary info (task, holder, status, etc.) is stored in a database, and I just want to give the user the ability to view a workflow diagram of the process.

I have come across the following commercial/proprietary solutions:

• ILOG Diagram for .NET.
• MindFusion's NetDiagram.
• Syncfusion's Essential Diagram.

Update:

• Nevron Diagram for .NET.
• GoDiagram for .NET.
• yFiles.NET.

There is also Diagram.NET, which is a free, open source diagramming library, but it hasn't been updated for some time now.

Do you have any recommendations regarding these products? Are there any other good solutions (free or commercial)?

There are evaluation versions of the commercial products mentioned above, and I'm planning to try them myself, but I thought that I should also seek the wisdom of SO :)

Update 2:

(Kind of a late update, but I'm doing it for the sake of completeness)

I ended up using EasyDiagram.NET, which is an open source AJAX-driven diagram control for ASP.NET. It's free and has a couple of nice features, but it is still in Beta and, more importantly, it does not contain a layout engine/logic; you have to do the layout yourself. For my case, that wasn't a big deal because the diagrams and their layouts were fairly simple.

There is also Open Diagram, which seems more advanced than EasyDiagram.NET, but it does not include graph layout either.

Answer 1

If you are just looking for diagramming the activities and their relationships without any built-in logic for constructing the actual workflows, you could extend your search to include Mind Mapping and Social Network Mapping tools. Those are both very popular right now.

If you want the tool to plug-in to Windows Workflow Foundation and you cannot have your users use Visual Studio, you may have some difficulty finding a solution.

*My searches a year ago yielded so-so results for all of the above, so I really have zero product recommendations. I'll be interested to see what people say...

If you can't buy and you must build, you could probably use a WPF Browser application or even Silverlight to create a rich tool.

Answer 2

It's worth mentioning that I have discovered Netron, which includes Netron.Diagramming.Web. Although it has a price tag, it is open source (GPL) and much cheaper than other commercial/proprietary solutions.

Answer 3

Have you tried the latest Microsoft ASP.NET Chart Control?

Answer 4

I'm in the same position. I need something to show diagrams and make them editable. In my case I'm using WinForms and ASP.NET. I've tried Syncfusion, Nevron and AddFlow. yWorks it's simply out of our budget. It was all I found at componentsource.

I'll try Netron, but I think that something like Syncfusion would have better support.

Which one have you chosen?

Thanks.

Answer 5

This might be a "dead" thread by now, but I am very interested in hearing what others have to say.

I have been using Nevron for a while, but in some very "non-standard" ways. So I have found that it is technically very flexible - but not necessarily "out the box" type functionality. The problem is to "evaluate" a tool you really need to spend a few weeks serious coding to test it out. I am just about to start to try and do some quick evals on MindFusion on SyncFusion. I have already ruled out GoDiagram, ILOG, AddFlow and Netrix, either in terms of cost or maturity.

So will be checking for new updates, or will post back some comments...