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If anyone ever needs to work with the image all you have to do is swap /plantuml/png to /plantuml/uml and you will see the definition of the diagram. You can also just embed this URL inside an HTML tag. ![]() –N93rJ2Bg4EDlSBlG0pn6wDiu5NiDcAU6piJzTgKN5NNPu040) that encodes the entire diagram definition. If you want to freeze a diagram version and send it to someone outside your organization you can simply send them an insanely long url (e.g. SEQUENCE DIAGRAM GENERATOR FROM TEXT CODEAfter you built a few diagrams and notice how easy it is to just move lines of code up and down and have changes in the code immediately reflect in your documentation you will love the automatic layouting. Sadly the layouting engine is not as good as you sometimes wish it to be and especially in component diagrams with 10+ nodes you might end up spending a lot of time enforcing specific layouts manually.įor sequence and activity diagrams the automatic layouting works great even for very large diagrams. This is beneficial when specifying the diagram because you only focus on the content - comparable to writing a LaTeX document. Instead the diagram is inferred by a deterministic algorithm in the rendering process. Layouting □Ĭompared with WYSIWYG editors PlantUML diagrams only define components and their relationship but not the actual layout of the diagram. You can browse the latest version or the LaTeX sourcecode on GitHub. I recently created a PlantUML Cheatsheet for a lot of useful tricks - it does however not cover the very basics of PlantUML syntax. Same goes for macros and definitions that allow you to compose larger diagrams or a common library for your team. you can declare/instantiate all nodes at the top, but if you do not declare them they will be inferred automatically. It is also well very smart in the way that it allows diagrams to be written with different flavors e.g. The basic syntax of PlantUML is very concise and builds a good foundation for the different diagram types. Reviewers can always see what changes have been made and easily compare changes to the diagram with changes made inside the code. One other benefit PlantUML has over the mentioned tools is that by defining your diagrams in plain text you make them diff-able in pull requests. Come PlantUML and GitLab rendering to the rescue: GitLab allows you to inline PlantUML diagrams directly into your Markdown files and they will be rendered on the fly when viewing the files in the browser. files into a repository does make sure your diagrams are always versioned with the code - but they are not browsable in Web UIs. Putting PowerPoint/Keynote/Visio/Enterprise Architect. One thing I was always lacking with this approach is visualizing things. By putting the documentation into the same repository as the code you make sure to always look at the correct state of documentation for a respective point in time.įor that reason I love putting all my documentation either within the sourcecode as comments or as Markdown files next to the sourcecode. SEQUENCE DIAGRAM GENERATOR FROM TEXT SOFTWAREAnother important part is versioning - usually software is versioned using git or similar systems. SEQUENCE DIAGRAM GENERATOR FROM TEXT UPDATEOne part is to update documentation if the code itself is updated. This post will not go into the details of each of those diagram types because the PlantUML website does a pretty good job at describing sequence, component, activity and the other diagram types.Ī basic component diagram showing data flow can be built using the following markup: componentĪpp -> to love PlantUML □ Versioning □Ī very important aspect for developing software and writing documentation is to keep it in sync. There are different diagram types available being described with custom syntax but following a common scheme. PlantUML Basics □□įor those that do not know PlantUML: It is an open source tool that allows you to define UML diagrams with plain text. Using it in different places and for various purposes I came across a bunch of issues that I want to share in this post. You can see it being used in my plantbuddy and techradar projects on GitHub. Lately I have been using PlantUML extensively at work but also in my private projects. I have been wanting to write this post for months. This post covers PlantUML basics and how it can be used in GitLab or GitHub projects as well as a seamless local development environment using Visual Studio Code. ![]()
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