How to display arbitrary yFiles (Java) realizers on a flex client using SWF nodes

Although yFiles Flex offers some compatibility styles for displaying Java node realizers on the client, displaying (custom) realizers which have no corresponding styles on the client can be difficult. A viable approach can be to export these realizers into a vector based graphics format and display the images of these nodes on the client.

To serialize nodes as SWF nodes, one can use the provided SWFNodeSerializer.java and register it to the com.yworks.yfiles.server.graphml.support.Graph2DRoundtripSupport:

Graph2DRoundtripSupport support = new Graph2DRoundtripSupport() {

      public LayoutGraph createRoundtripGraph() {
        LayoutGraph graph = super.createRoundtripGraph();
        graph.addDataProvider(SWFNodeSerializer.NODE_2_SWF_CACHE_DPKEY, Maps.createHashedDataMap());
        return graph;
      }

      protected void configureHandler(GraphMLIOHandler handler) {
        super.configureHandler(handler);
        RealizerSerializerManager rsm = handler.getRealizerSerializerManager();
        SWFNodeSerializer shapeSwfNodeSerializer = new SWFNodeSerializer( ShapeNodeRealizer.class );
        SWFNodeSerializer gnrSwfNodeSerializer = new SWFNodeSerializer( GenericNodeRealizer.class );
        rsm.addNodeRealizerSerializer(shapeSwfNodeSerializer);
        rsm.addNodeRealizerSerializer(gnrSwfNodeSerializer);
      }
    };

The LoadSWFGraphServlet.java demonstrates how to extend the com.yworks.yfiles.server.graphml.demo.servlets.LoadGraphMLServlet to use the custom serializer.