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Graphviz dot examples1/4/2024 ![]() It also includes examples for work breakdown structure, MindMap, ArchiMate and Gantt diagrams which will become available soon. The PlantUML macro section includes typical activity, state, component, class and sequence diagrams. (Other websites, such as the excellent, present diagrams by category which presupposes you know what kind of diagram you need.) Each example contains the name of the diagram, a short description, the diagram itself, and a “see the code” block, plus links to related documentation. I wanted a page where I could scan through visual examples with a use case in mind. The bulk of the guide is a three-column image gallery with a simple example of each kind of diagram. There are a few FAQs that answer the questions I had: What is this, anyway? How do I know what kind of diagram to use? What Confluence macros should I use? How does this work? (I still haven’t found an accessible explanation of how Confluence, macros and Graphviz work together.) How could I work on diagrams without breaking a wiki page? The diagram gallery There’s a short opening paragraph which explains the very basics of what UML and DOT are (languages), what Graphviz is (both a rendering engine and a Confluence macro) and which macros display which types of diagrams. Two and a half years after I started, I wrote the guide I wish I’d had in the very beginning: “UML and DOT diagrams for impatient beginners.” (It’s in our Confluence wiki, of course, available to any internal user.) They’d have questions too, and no time to learn an entire modeling language or install Visio. I realized that even developers with deep coding experience might want to add diagrams but not know UML. Little by little, in my spare time, I kept throwing UML at my brain until it started to stick and I could apply what I’d learned to actual, real-world documentation needs: a Jira workflow, an onboarding process, a qualification process.Īs I learned and practiced, I took notes. My use cases were very different too, business processes instead of components. I needed context, explain-to-an-8-year-old-level answers to my silly rank beginner questions, and lots of simple examples that I could gleefully mash up into small successes. ![]() I was startled to find most resources “explained” diagrams without ever saying what they actually were I was forever walking into the middle of some highly-advanced conversation. The kind of guide I wanted was very different from what I found. What I learned was…how much I needed to learn! I found online documentation and an old O’Reilly book on UML. I was excited to learn how to turn text into images. But without any background in computer science, without having ever written code, UML diagrams started out as a very hard nut to crack indeed. A lifelong learn-by-doing disciple, I’d bent HTML, CSS and JavaScript to my will through sheer force of personality and lots of Googling and dark chocolate. Learning how to make UML diagrams in Confluence was an uphill slog at first.
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