How to layout a non-tree hierarchy with D3

Question

D3 has a variety of layouts for directed graphs that are strict trees, such as the following:

A
|\\
B C
 / \\
D   E

I need to draw a hierar

Answer 1

Speaking generally of trees and the data hierarchy, you just need to have "D" in the children list for both B and C.

Creating your node list, make sure you have a unique id returned so that "D" doesn't appear twice.

vis.selectAll("g.node").data(nodes, function(d) { return d.id; });

Then when you call

var links = tree.links(nodes)

you should get D appearing as the "target" twice (with B and C as the "source" respectively) which results in two lines to the single node "D".