A drawing document is represented by the NDrawingDocument class, which derives from the NGenericDocument<NDrawing>, which essentially means that the content of a drawing document is an instance of the NDrawing class, which represents a diagram drawing (see Drawings for more information).

The drawing view is represented by the NDrawingView class, which is essentially a widget that is designed to display the content of a drawing document. In this way you can integrate a drawing inside any NOV UI hierarchy (see UI Overview for more info).

The drawing document displayed by the drawing view is accessible via the Document property. When a drawing view is created, it by default also creates an empty drawing document inside it.

The following code creates a drawing view, the document of which has some shapes and is placed inside a stack panel.

// Create a stack panel
NStackPanel stack = new NStackPanel();
stack.Add(new NButton("Some Button"));

// Add a drawing view in the stack panel
NDrawingView drawingView = new NDrawingView();
stack.Add(drawingView);

// Get the drawing view document, the drawing and its active page
NDrawingDocument document = drawingView.Document;
NDrawing drawing = document.Content;
NPage activePage = drawing.ActivePage;

// Instead of the 3 lines above you can also use the shortcut property:
// NPage activePage = drawingView.ActivePage;

// Add a rectangle shape to the active page items
NShape rectangleShape = new NBasicShapeFactory().CreateShape(ENBasicShape.Rectangle);
rectangleShape.Text = "My First Shape";
activePage.Items.Add(rectangleShape);

The drawing view Commander is populated with commands that perform different actions upon the drawing view and its content (see the Commanding topic for a fundamental overview of commands).

All commands that reside inside in the drawing view Commander are defined in the Nevron.Nov.Diagram.DrawingCommands namespace.