Pfthb

This is not a duplicate of the Reingold-tolford, since that's just for drawing normal tree like structures. specifically I am looking for an algorithm where a node can link to a node thats not only on the level below it.

I'm building a tree like structure within a canvas control in WPF.
Currently I have a structure built like this(ignore the collisions of boxes I have that fixed) that generates automatically from my data.

While this structure isn't to bad, it'd be nice to work towards something with less collisions.

Therefore are there any algorithms I can follow and work with to draw a graph like this with less collisions.

I'm calculating all positions of the boxes like this currently,

flattenedList is a List < List< Object>> hence the i, j itteration. and that object has a treePosition Property with an X and Y double.

var canvasWidthFinder = new List<int>();
//Loop through all componentversions, use indexes to calc their positions.
for (int i = 0; i < flattenedList.Count; i++)

 canvasWidthFinder.Add(flattenedList[i].Count);
 for (int j = 0; j < flattenedList[i].Count; j++)
 
 flattenedList[i][j].TreePosition.YPosition = (i * 150) + 25;
 flattenedList[i][j].TreePosition.XPosition = ((Canvas.ActualWidth / (flattenedList[i].Count + 1)) * (j + 1)) - (125 / 2);
 

Canvas.Width = (canvasWidthFinder.Max() * 160);

These values are then used to draw borders with text inside and lines drawn between the connecting ones.

You could represent links that skip layers by creating dummy items in the intermediate layers. Then when you display the tree you could replace each dummy item with a vertical line instead of a block.