Frequently Asked Questions
Contents
Assuming that you diagram's description is in the file Diag.java,
issue the command:
umlgraph Diag png
java -jar path-to/UmlGraph.jar -package -output - Diag.java | dot -Tpng -oDiag.png Diag.dot
In the above you can change png to another file format,
and add more UMLGraph switches at the end of the line.
UMLGraph uses guillemot characters for representing the angle brackets around
stereotypes, as in «interface».
By default these are encoded as ISO-8859-1 characters, which are illegal
in the UTF-8 output that dot generates for SVG.
When using dot to generate SVG output, you should also specify
-outputencoding utf8 to UMLGraph.
Both
dot and
pic2plot can directly produce bitmap images in
formats like GIF, PNG and PNM.
However, if you want to produce presentation-quality output
the a vector output format like Postscript or SVG is preferable.
If you do require a bitmap format, it might be worth to create
it at a higher resolution from a Postscript image, and then downsample it.
This procedure (used for the diagrams appearing on the UMLGraph web site)
will create an antialiased image of a higher quality than what the default
bitmap output options produce.
The following pipeline is an example of how you can achieve this
effect:
dot -Tps FILENAME.dot |
gs -q -r360 -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pnm -sOutputFile=- - -c quit |
pnmcrop |
pnmscale 0.25 |
ppmtogif >FILENAME.gif
(David Griffiths reports that he had to add to the gs command
-sPAPERSIZE=a4 or
-dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=1000 to avoid getting
his results chopped-off.)
One other possibility for converting the sequence diagram into Postscript
is to pass it through pic and groff.
Tools like ps2epsi and ps2eps can then be used to
convert the Postscript into encapsulated Postscript.
Of course, groff users will just use the pic
program as part of their processing pipeline.
Try manipulating the dot parameters ratio, minlen, ranksep, and
nodesep.
For example, Arnaud Rogues recommends running dot with
command-line arguments as follows.
dot -Gratio=0.7 -Eminlen=2
Most probably your class diagram uses packages, and you are not
qualifying the classes with the respective package names in the
tags you use.
The tags are not smart enough to do the package resolution,
so you will have to prepend the package name to the class,
or avoid using packages.
Problematic Specification
package test;
abstract class AbstractNode {}
/** @composed 1 has * AbstractNode */
class InnerNode extends AbstractNode {}
class Leaf extends AbstractNode {}
First Approach: Class Name Qualified with the Package
package test;
abstract class AbstractNode {}
/** @composed 1 has * test.AbstractNode */
class InnerNode extends AbstractNode {}
class Leaf extends AbstractNode {}
Second Approach: No Package Specification
abstract class AbstractNode {}
/** @composed 1 has * test.AbstractNode */
class InnerNode extends AbstractNode {}
class Leaf extends AbstractNode {}
Yes they should.
Unfortunately, dot does not (yet) support a way to underline
single labels, and thus UMLGraph can not show the static fields
underlined.
A port of pic2plot for Windows can be found in
GNU PlotUtils, which is part of the
GnuWin32
project.
On Windows platforms note that the current version of
pic2plot appears to be very picky about carriage return (CR - \r)
characters (by default, CR is part of the platform's end of line sequence)
appearing in its input file.
Therefore, you will probably want to instruct your editor to create
Unix-style files, or filter the files to remove the carriage return
characters.
The following Perl invocation is such a filter:
perl -p -e "BEGIN {binmode(STDOUT);} s/\r//"
In addition, pic2plot appears to require that the last input file
be properly terminated (with a newline).
Apparently, some Windows editors may leave the last line unterminated,
so if your editor is in this category it may be safer to add a blank line
in the end.
Sorry, I did not develop this plugin, and therefore can not offer help.
Have a look at the project's documentation and mailing lists available through
plugin web page.
You can't.
You have to write the pic code for the sequence diagrams by hand.
When you pass the packagenames option to
javadoc, the default (unnamed) package (and the
UMLOptions class
located in it) is ignored.
In such cases you should include the UMLOptions class
within a named package.
Make sure you are running Java 1.5 (run java -version to see).
If you are not running 1.5 you may need to adjust the symbolic links
in
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions.
This blog entry describes
a simple solution that has worked for me.
Depending on your requirements YMMV.
This happens due to a know javadoc bug.
By fixing the classpath used for the UNLGraph invocation you can avoid this
problem.
Olivier Duysens notes:
JBuilder users need to go to Preferences/Build/Ant,
and tick the box "Use project libraries when running ant" to solve the issue.
UMLGraph is distributed under the
BSD license
(see the file LICENSE in the distribution).
For uniformity with the rest of the web content appearing on this site,
the web site of UMLGraph appears under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5
license.
This affects only the UMLGraph home page; all other material
(for example the documentation) is also part of the UMLGraph distribution,
and can therefore be used under the BSD license.
This exception will occur when you execute UMLGraph directly as a jar
(not throughjavadoc), and the files UmlGraph.jar and tools.jar
are not in the same directory.
Either copy UmlGraph.jar in the directory where the tools.jar
of the JDK distribution is located (and execute UmlGraph.jar from there),
or copy tools.jar to the directory where UmlGraph.jar is located.
(The file tools.jar is typically located in the lib directory
of your JDK distribution.)
This appears to be a limitation of pic2plot.
You can work around it, by increasing the width and height values appearing
in the SVG XML file that pic2plot generates.
You need to pass the -private flag to javadoc.
Note that
when processing code that includes annotations
defined by libraries outside the core J2SE distribution,
it is a good idea to include the library jars to the classpath.
Otherwise, javadoc (and concequently UMLGraph)
will fail to process the input classes correctly.
This is a known issue with javadoc,
but only manifests in certain occasions when running UMLGraph,
for example when processing private class fields.
Last change: Tuesday, October 28, 2014 4:26 pm