[Uml-devel] auto-layout and graphviz

[Andrew Sutton]

>thanks Andrew,
>your information are very useful, however at the moment I only need a good wya
>to map the internal structure of class diagram of umbrello with the model used
>to describe grpah by graphviz. perhaps I'll take a look to the approach used in
>doxygen.
>If you have any further suggestion i'll be glad to read it
>

no problem. i looked at a bunch of layout stuff a couple years ago, but
decided not to implement it because i hate writing graphics code and
algorithms - kinda strange for a cs person. that said, my uml
implementation (the Open Modeling Framework - which was actually
supposed to be umbrello2) still doesn't have a user interface. sorry...
had to plug the OMF :)

i really don't know much about the internal structures of graphviz and
how easy they are to map onto umbrello's internal structure. my best
guess would be to use umbrello to generate a .dot file and then use
graphviz (dot) to generate a .ps with the rendered uml diagram. not very
flexible, but it worked for my thesis.

attached is a .dot file i created from reverse engineering a program
called hippodraw. it's using a bunch of html within the graph
specification to get the rendering more correct than normal. hopefully,
graphviz has gotten a little more sophisticated html rendering than it
did when i originally wrote the program.

on a side note, i'm actually starting to consider writing a uml viz
library for kde. since the new ksvg/kcanvas code has become
significantly more stable in the last 2 years, i'm going to try and use
it to create a kind of highly stylized interface for the display (and
possibly editing) of uml class diagrams. think of it as an integrated
html/svg/uml/css type widget.

hmm... i wonder if the umbrello folks would be interested :)

andrew sutton
asutton at cs.kent.edu