The yFiles library offers sophisticated functionality that can help in a variety of problem fields. Following are some example drawings of diagrams from different kinds of application domains. All of these drawings have been computed automatically by layout algorithms from the yFiles library.

In database design as well as database management and administration Entity-Relationship diagrams (E-R diagrams) are used to sketch and to visualize entities together with their relations. Figure 1.5, “Entity-Relationship diagram” shows an example of an E-R diagram.

In software engineering the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is widely recognized as the standard to model the relationships between classes. Figure 1.6, “Software engineering” presents a high-quality UML diagram of a mid-sized project.

The UML notation is also used in software documentation. yDoc, for instance, a Javadoc™ extension that can embed UML diagrams into API documentations, uses the yFiles library to automatically generate drawings that reflect the class and/or package dependencies inherent to a Java project. Figure 1.7, “Software documentation” shows the UML diagram of a small excerpt of such a project.