Generating UML diagrams from textual representation

Question

How can I generate a UML sequence diagram from a file containing a textual representation of my process, with command-line tools in Linux?

score 17 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 09 '18 at 09:42

Although PlantUML is listed in the accepted answer (among many other tools) it merits more attention.

In addition to being easily wrapped into a command line tool, PlantUML also has

excellent documentation (check out the docs for sequence diagrams)
simple and powerful syntax (may compare favorably with UMLGraph)
styleable output
extensive tool integration (Emacs, Sphinx)

However PlantUML comes as a java archive so the following setup may be required:

java
graphviz (not required for sequence diagrams)
a bash wrapper

java and graphviz are available as packages for the major linux distros. PlantUML itself is available for Fedora and Ubuntu.

If your distribution does not provide a package, download a jar file from the main site and wrap as a bash script.

A bash wrapper (as follows) can be stored in a file named plantuml on your path i.e. one of the directories listed by echo $PATH. Don't forget to make it executable with chmod u+x plantuml.

#!/bin/bash
# from the vim syntax plugin README at aklt/plantuml-syntax on github
java -jar $HOME/path/to/plantuml.jar -tsvg $@

Then run plantuml apple.uml berry.uml and plantuml will create apple.svg berry.svg.

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 11 '16 at 10:46

6

There are many (many=more than 10) tools for this.
See a complete list.

edited Mar 11 '16 at 10:46

Sergey Vyacheslavovich Brunov

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answered May 09 '10 at 20:57

Jordi Cabot

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered May 09 '10 at 13:45

2

Not sure if it's what you want, but UMLGraph can generate sequence diagrams using graphviz and ghostscript...

answered May 09 '10 at 13:45

jcayzac

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Ghostscript isn't needed. GraphViz can directly generate PNG, SVG, and many other file types. – Diomidis Spinellis Jul 08 '10 at 14:09
@Diomidis: re-reading my comment, I realize I got several things mixed up: - GraphViz (alone) is used to generate class diagrams - the GNU plotutils (alone) are used to generate sequence diagrams. In some script I wrote a long time ago, I was using ghostscript to render the diagram at a high resolution. Then it was fed to ImageMagick to make the background transparent. See http://blog.julien.cayzac.name/2004/11/drawing-uml-sequence-diagrams-with-gnu.html – jcayzac Aug 04 '10 at 01:46

score 2 · Answer 4 · edited Feb 08 '17 at 14:25

2

If your text representation is closely similar to yuml, you might be able to use it to produce images, e.g.

Simple Association

[Customer]->[Billing Address]
<img src="http://yuml.me/diagram/scruffy/class/[Customer]->[Billing Address]"/>
Image of sample UML relationship

edited Feb 08 '17 at 14:25

Community

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answered May 09 '10 at 14:04

Bert F

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score 2 · Answer 5 · answered May 09 '10 at 15:47

2

http://umlet.com/ is another solution

answered May 09 '10 at 15:47

Florian Diesch

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score 2 · Answer 6 · answered Feb 13 '12 at 10:05

Put the following source into .html file and open it in a browser:

<html>
    <head>
        <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script>
        <script>
            $(document).ready(function () {
                $('textarea').each(function () {
                    $(this).hide();
                    var source = $(this).html();
                    $('body').append('<img src="http://yuml.me/diagram/scruffy/class/'
                        + source + '" />');
                });
            });
        </script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <textarea>
            [note: You can stick notes on diagrams too!{bg:cornsilk}],
            [Customer]<>1-orders 0..*>[Order],
            [Order]++*-*>[LineItem],
            [Order]-1>[DeliveryMethod],
            [Order]*-*>[Product],
            [Category]<->[Product],
            [DeliveryMethod]^[National],
            [DeliveryMethod]^[International]
        </textarea>
    </body>
</html>

You should be able to see the sample diagram corresponding to the source within the textarea tag. Correct the source according to the yuml samples to draw your own diagram.

Paul Sweatte · Answer 7 · 2015-04-02T04:38:21.830

-1

Use a script to replace:

One space with multiple spaces
Commas with column characters, such as |
Newline characters with carriage returns plus space indentation
Dashes with multiple dashes
Greater than and less than characters with column span characters

References

edited Apr 02 '15 at 04:38

answered Mar 20 '15 at 06:08

Paul Sweatte

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Generating UML diagrams from textual representation

7 Answers7