![]() ![]() A different developer contributed each piece of the puzzle, and I discovered and installed them in about three seconds. So there I was, nearly done cobbling together my own tooling to work on Graphviz diagrams, when I found a much smoother experience presented on a silver platter. I _was_ surprised, however, by the, which previews the output right there in the editor, as you type! I wasn’t surprised at all by the, which provides syntax highlighting for this arcane language. I searched Visual Studio Code’s available extensions: One last stop before I start writing: syntax highlighting. None of my SVG-viewing applications pick up the file change automatically, but it’s not too bad to tab over and refresh. Next, wanting to iterate quickly, I set up a watcher to automatically recompile when the input file changes. The primary tool in the Graphviz suite is `dot`, which reads a source file and emits one of several output types. It’s not beautiful, but it sure beats dragging endpoints around with a mouse. Here’s the source for the image at the top of the post: The documentation scared me a little when it warned that the syntax is _”not really HTML,”_ but then they made up for it by providing a formal grammar of exactly what is accepted. , read through some documentation, and finally found just the ticket.Ī relatively recent addition to Graphviz (circa 2003!) is the This carefully-named feature lets you specify node appearance using familiar HTML ` ` syntax, with the addition of named _ports_ where you can connect arrows. I was familiar with its flowchart-like diagrams of bubbles, boxes, and diamonds, but I thought I’d check to see if it could be coaxed into producing connected tables. Even if you haven’t used it directly, you’ve probably seen Graphviz output before, perhaps in an or a database. is a collection of utilities and libraries for generating diagrams from a language called DOT. I intended to check these files into source control, so they needed to diff and merge nicely.ĭo any tools come to mind? I searched around for a while before dusting off an old one: It works with a text-based source format.Table entries can be edited and reordered without breaking links.I do not want to manually position the ends of arrows, ever. In particular, I sought the following properties: Like software, they had to be easy to change. The diagrams I was producing describe software. Specifically, I was documenting how a software system accepts data from a third party, mapping fields from external records to an internal message type:īasically, I wanted to draw arrows between rows of tables. When I came up short, I used a very old tool instead. Questions, comments, and suggestions for improvement are welcome.I recently found myself looking for a modern tool to diagram relationships between tables of data. If you use this in your software, I would greatly appreciate a credit in your software's about page I've put a fair amount of time in to this project, and wish to spread the word that others may benefit from it. While it can work with the built-in (and unsupported) mwdot function, it is recommended you install the full GraphViz suite, available at, along with extensive documentation and samples.Ĭredit goes to Jonas Ballani for his Bezier function which is used to draw the splines.Īlso, the inspiration came from Leon Peshkin's GraphViz interface, which (unfortunately) didn't quite cut it for our needs, and required me to write my own. Furthermore, custom node shapes and arrows can be easily added. It has been quite extensively tested, and should work for just about any graph you can throw at it. Please see the comments at the beginning of the file for more information on usage/limitations. ![]() This code takes a GraphViz ready DOT file, passes it to Graphviz (either using dot (fallback to mwdot if not present) or a custom layout engine you specify.) The output is then parsed and drawn in an axes specified by you, along with returning object handles and information about the graph as an adjacency matrix. ![]()
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