Automatic diagrams

[mrmasterplan]

Automatic diagrams

[sjkp]

I have not much experience with building something like this myself, but have used mermaid docs before. One thing I find problematic with auto generated diagrams however is the layout of them. A lot of readability in a diagram comes form the placing the elements in the correct reading order, left-> to -> right or top -> down organized in some meaningful manner, so if you are going full automate on diagram creation I would suggest that you at least add some manual knobs to turn the layout.

[LauJohansson]

I like this idea. Of course, it gets more "boring" layout (less flexible), BUT we can ensure that our documentation actually contains the classes that we use. The automatic creation of the diagram will remove the manual process of updating it. Furthermore, we use the same symbols and often the ETL process uses the same direction - therefore it is obvious that exactly this can be automated.

[mrmasterplan]

Automatically created diagrams are always going to be ugly. I have abandoned this work.

Another way could be to go the other way round,

• define a grammar for how drawio diagrams relate to code and then unpack the drawing to check consistency with some markup...

But really. The only kind of diagram that people will consistently update is a diagram that is functional. I therefore think that the best thing to use for now is Databricks' task-orchestration. I will now close this issue. Please use task orchestration if you have not tried it already