Markdown: Text to UML Sequence diagram

[augurk]

Markdown: Text to UML Sequence diagram

[marktaling]

Later today we hope to release the first part of our effort to support UML, sadly this does net yet includes Sequence Diagrams. Those should follow in the next few weeks.

Similar to the "generic" UML above we will implement code blocks for sequence diagrams, eg;:

    ```Sequence
    Your sequence diagram
    ```

[GijsvanDulmen]

Sounds like a great feature. PlantUML support would be even better?

[marktaling]

This is something we have had our eye on for a while now. There are multiple ways to include support for Sequence Diagrams as well as other UML diagrams. I've also heard the request for PlantUML before. The annoying part here is that most solutions (like PlantUML) require you to host an additional part of software somewhere, making it difficult to ship this as a part of Augurk whilst maintaining our core belief that Augurk should be able to run completely within the user's own intranet.

One of the paths we are considering is to provide a plugin model. That way we could present a PlantUML plugin which you could install and then connect to your own PlantUML instance (or a generic one in the cloud, should you so desire). This would also allow for plugins that are a bit smaller in scale (like nomnoml).

As of yet, we have not made a decision which way we should move, a flexible plugin model or dedicated UML support.

What are your thoughts here? What would you expect from a tool like Augurk?

[anthonyhuebers]

Currently our documentation exist of a set of Adoc (some kind of Markdown) files combined with Pickles. This results in a documentation container for every build.

In Adoc we use the PlantUML syntax to define for example Component Diagrams and Sequence Diagrams. These Sequence Diagrams are mostly used to describe the flow of a feature(file). At the moment next to a .feature file we add a .adoc file for the features that have one or more sequence diagrams.

With asciidoctor we generate the documentation for all the .adoc files combined and with the asciidoctor diagram plugin we get our diagrams within the documentation but, this documentation is not integrated with Pickles.

What we would like to have these feature Sequence Diagrams added to the Specflow documentation of that specific feature. We also want to have one integrated opensource tool that is able to furfill these needs.

Preferably we would like to stick to the plantuml syntax but are in a fase that we are still able to switch to a different syntax if needed. As a alternative to the PlantUML system we thought of integrating a javascript framework/plugin that generates the drawings on the fly within the .html files provided by for example Pickles. But we prefer to use a tool that includes these text to digram features instead of reinventing the weel our self.

[anthonyhuebers]

That looks great! Please notify us when Sequence Diagrams are added!

[jmezach]

With the release of 2.8.0 we have also enabled support for sequence diagrams: