After reading thru the archives after subscribing (like a good little
boy). I noticed much talk about generating dia XML from SQL.
Unfortunately nobody has mentioned using perl/DBI to handle abstracted
databases. (DBI also allows ODBC, etc). Limiting yourself to making direct
mysql calls would be foolish.
There is a nice perl module called Graphviz::DBI which builds diagrams
from DBI calls that is likely quite useful to look at, for an idea of
building diagrams. Although it should be fairly easy to parse DBI data to
dia xml.
at this point I shall plug my own little hack - soon to be published and
called autodial (AUTOmatic DIA xmL generator). So far it creates (although
rather untidily) class diagrams with added dependancies from a list of
perl files.
If I had time I'd write a DBI-> xml perl module but I have some intranet
stuff that I was working on before I got side-tracked (ie distracted by
fun new hack ;) into dia xml stuff.
I am following graphviz perl dev as well dia and general perl lists and
will try and cross-polinate where possible as compatibility and idea
sharing between graphviz and dia would be cool.
if anybody wants a pre-release of autodial (as I said auto-layout is
b0rken but all the xml is generated, also it is a single hacked script due
to be turned into a nice OO module that can run on itself rsn) mail me
offlist.
so has anybody got some working code for generating xml from
odbc/dia/mysql and what language is it in? Also has anybody got a nice
simple algorithm for laying out a diagram for dummys - all this talk of
orthoganal and edges and nodes in the scientific papers on the subject
makes my brain hurt ;)
regards,
A.
