Re: new release
On Wed, 9 May 2001, James Henstridge wrote: I also enabled the python plugin in the build, as libtool-1.4 (which was released recently) contains the features needed to build it (libtool-1.3.x would not build it successfully, as it couldnt link libpython.x.y.a against a shared library). To build the python plugin, you need to pass the --with-python option to configure. theres a python plugin? is there a perl plugin? please let there be a perl plugin. then I could do my crazy perl magic as a plugin rather than a seperate app. A.
automatic dia xml from code - autodia v0.5
hi all, its been a while since I announced a release of autodia on the list. This time has a good reason, not only is it the beta version (ie fully functional and fairly stable) but the name has changed and most importantly it now supports multiple languages through handlers, currenly only the perl handler works, although a half finished experimental c++ handler is included if people want to experiment. the url is http://droogs.org/autodial/ or check freshmeat for dia xml auto now to test it against Dia 0.87 :) regards, A.
Re: Dia SQL export plug-in available
There is a project on sourcefore called Alzabo which will create an SQL database from an object representation or will go the opposite direction as well (reverse engineer an existing SQL database to create an object representation. handy. I know somebody else who is doing something like that and has just rolled his own, I'll mail the url to him. also I could use it or chunks of it (assuming its under a decent license) for autodia. It sounds very useful. The object representation can be manipulated via html/browser screens and the changes zapped back into the database. I was thinking of writing a perl script which would create DIA UML diagrams (the text file) from the internal representations in Alzabo (also written in perl). These diagrams could be visualized in DIA, modified (move around the boxes so result is better formatted), and then reparsed by a script to be compatible with Alzabo, which would write the changes into the actual database (and ignore/retain the visual formatting info) Try using autodia's Diagram and DiagramFoo modules - they do most of the hard work, better still write a Handler - I'd appreciate any feedback on how the framework works for stuff like that. Perhaps your Dia SQL plugin, or the Dia2SQL can do the same thing? I think Dia2sql reads the Dia XML (fairly easy as long as you don't use DOM) and creates Dia XML statements. This can be taken further and actually inereact directly with a Dataase if you feel like living on the egde and have some perl skillz up your sleeve. The basic need here is to build up enough tools so that once you have a Dia UML diagram, something can be done with it besides hanging it up on the wall. So far I have enough tools to create Dia UML diagrams from most data sources. Next I plan to add support for GraphViz (which handily lays out diagrams) and then do UML to Code / SQL / XML / Documentation / HTML. A.
documentation?
just curious where the peeps who were going to do some more documentation have got to.. any news? urls? agendas? I am just working on a guide to creating, parsing and manipulating Dia's XML format - if you are very very lucky I might even do an annotated version of the DTD, but don't hold your breath and somebody who created it or works with it more than me might be better at it. Anybody who knows teh DTD or is involved in how Dia mucks about with its XML can you conact me on or off list? The guide will consist mostly of recycled AutoDIAL (http://www.droogs.org/autodial/) code and documentation although I'm reading up on various bits of Dia so expect to see some of the FAQ in there and some pointers to IBM deverloperworks research papers on using xml and perl. Also the tutorial will be perl oriented because thats how I parse XML because nothing else has teh sheer power and versatility of perl. Anybody interested in contributing to it please respond on or off list. in case you're wondering several friends have asked me to explain how to do some stuff with Dia XML and rather than work out their problems I'm just doing this guide to keep them off my back *grin*. regards, A. P.S. spam product=autodial category=press release AutoDIAL is now at version 0.04, it finds some attributes and most methods and handles most perl code. version 0.05 will be mostly optimisations and bug fixes (although nobody has sent me any bugs on it yet) and will the beta before I release version 1.0. from there I plan to add support for multiple languages and also provide a way of choosing whether to output to dia or graphviz. / -- .sig is currently undergoing engineering works, please change at piccadilly circus.
Re: documentation?
On Sat, 5 May 2001, Aaron Trevena wrote: just curious where the peeps who were going to do some more documentation have got to.. any news? urls? agendas? Its ok - I'll reply to myself... :) its a saturday and it sunny outside but dial up is chaper weekends than weekdays sooo.. I am just working on a guide to creating, parsing and manipulating Dia's XML format - if you are very very lucky I might even do an annotated version of the DTD, but don't hold your breath and somebody who created it or works with it more than me might be better at it. Anybody who knows teh DTD or is involved in how Dia mucks about with its XML can you conact me on or off list? pH33R my '13et Go0gL3 5k1Llz!! back in november Bryan J. Smith posted this to a different list that I may have to slurp into Mail::Audit for data mining later: http://www.matrixlist.com/pipermail/leaplist/2000-November/007909.html included in his mail is this url about GNOME/Dia and XML. http://linux.inrialpes.fr/veillard/XML/xml.html also check out http://togaware.com/linuxbook/dia.pdf - the dia chapter from toga's linux book and our very own James' page on xml-sax giving you agood idea on Dia does its XML. http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/xml-sax/xml-sax.html anybody now if these urls are less relevent than they seem. anyways I'll use them as a starting point for my k-rad guide to doing bad voodoo with Dia's xml. cheers, A. (TheBlueJackal on Freshmeat, Mojo Jojo on any unreal tournament server) -- .sig is currently undergoing engineering works, please change at piccadilly circus.
Re: New version soon?
On Tue, 1 May 2001, Hans Breuer wrote: - work on all major platforms, (Does this include Gnome 1.4; anyone using Gnome 1.4 out there ?) - make available all the bugfixes since the last official version (Dia 0.86 has had some serious problems with some menu actions, see: Objects/Align/Equal Distance thread. Are there any *users* out there ?) - contain less bugs/more features than the previous release - silence complaining about bugs, which got fixed month ago - be localized properly ? I think one of the biggest features would be increasing extensibility or providing more and easier to find documentation on extending dia, be it plugins or tools that work along side Dia. but thats just me because I never want to use Visio again, actually I never want to use any diagram prgram again I want it all to work magically thru perl scripts and xml and mind reading, but one step at a time :) as for releasing early and often - thats what CVS is for amongst the other good points hans makes. One of the things that makes a software project more dynamic is having making it more accesable through plugins and api's and documentation that mean people can pick it up and start hacking. I'd love to hack dia but my C isn't too hot, hence me doing automagic with Dia's XML using perl, having an API or a way to do perl plugins would make a huge difference. finally thanks to the Dia developers and maintainers for doing things the right way - the XML file format is really useful - I am using it to create UML class diagrams in perl and now I'm parsing the xml into text/html documentation as well. I know of a bunch of other projects that taking the xml and doing cool stuff with it like dia2sql. Anyone got any thoughts on Graphviz - it does automagic layout, don't know how much use or interest it would be to the Dia developers? I am planning to make my code work with both Dia and Graphviz. regards, A. spam ps - anybody need a decent perl developer in london, uk?(email me offlist) pps - automagic xml goodness : http://droogs.org/autodial/ (ditto) /spam
Dia - xml : instant UML class diagrams from your perl!
AutoDIAL is a small perl based app that generates a Dia UML class diagram from your perl code. with small modification it can work on C, Java or python. Its alpha and the layout of relationship connectors is a bit flakey, but on the whole it could save a lot of time in building diagrams of yoru code, and teh xml can easily be parsed to create text documentation as well. (in fact I'll bang sonmethig together to do just that rsn). I have mentioned it a couple of times on list but since I have been unemployed for a bit I have spent a little time on it and now its ready for first release. you can find it at http://droogs.org/autodial/ thought some of you might be interested, if nobody is interested I'll do a round of hail RMS's as pennance, and randomly uninstall a piece of proprietary software from my computer. :) A.
RE: ooh! dia -- sql
On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Rhys Lewis wrote: Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 16:48:48 - From: Rhys Lewis [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "'[EMAIL PROTECTED]'" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: ooh! dia -- sql Resent-Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 17:44:38 +0100 (MET) Resent-From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I have a rough sql2dia.pl that runs off mysql dump files. Anyone want to look after it as a project? that sounds interesting.. can you put it online somewhere and post the url, if nothing else I could probably steal^w integrate some of it into autodial.p[l|m]. release of which has been postponed til late wednesday at the earliest due to me getting tired and making silly mistaikes. rgds, A.
Re: OPEN REQUEST FOR RESURRECTING DOCUMENTATION
On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Scott Harrison wrote: Fine with me. Nice set of pages you have there. So I guess the next big question is, WHO WANTS TO HELP DOCUMENT THINGS? I'm more interested in the xml side - ie creating tools to work with the xml or plugins to work with dia. I'd be able to provide a little about the xml from my own reverse engineering hopefully one of the dev team can provide more info (DTD isn't documentation enough). A.
ooh! dia -- sql
http://freshmeat.net/projects/dia2sql/ courtesy of squackers.. A.
Re: Dia 0.86 I/O problem
On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, Oystein Godoy wrote: 2. "Save" it as .dia This also "seems" to work, though the first time I try to save a diagram into a [.dia] file the following message is printed: xmlNewGlobalNs() deprecated function reached Note, this message comes only the first time I try to save a dia file. 3. "Export" it as a web-usable format -- and make sure you use some extension other than ".dia" for that! (If you save a jpg as ".dia" it will overwrite the real .dia file, and you can no longer edit the file) This works nice. As long as I am working on the diagram I can save it into any of the formats listed in the export menu. The problem comes when I find an error in my diagram and want to modify. Yes, I am aware of the risk of overwriting the dia file when saving in other formats. However, in the example described below using the ER-demo.dia file no export to other formats were involved... Then I go to: 4. Using menu [File-Open] I get the following pop-up message upon opening my newly saved dia file: Error loading diagram /home/faog/mydiag.dia. Not a Dia file. The dia source distribution contains some example dia files in the samples directory. I have opened the ER-demo.dia file, which was no problem. I then saved this file from my File-Save As menu. Both the original and the newly saved ER-demo.dia files were gunzipped. The two versions of the ER-demo.dia file are attached to this message. The original version as ER-demo.dia and the newly saved as ER-demo-mycopy.dia. As far as I can tell these files are quite different though I would expect them to exactly the same (I did not export the file in other formats after I started dia). have you tried gzip -d filename, mv filename filename.xml and then loading it. If that works you will have narrowed down the area of the problem to the compression/decompression. If gzip fails then that should help locate the bug. I don't know if dia uses its own (de)compression lib or one of the GNU ones (is it zlib?) the problem *might* be with with the compression/decompression as I am using dia 0.86 with the current stable helix gnome (its pretty okay, and I hate manually sorting out dependancies of a hundred odd rpms) and dead rat 6.2 (i didn't install the system) and I have had no problems loading and saving both gzip'd xml and plain xml in dia. in summary - if you can decompress the saved file with gzip -d then the decompression in dia is having issues (possibly a borken dependancy) if not then the compression in is having issues (again possibly a borken dependancy but I haven't read the makefile or code). Any results you have from experimenting with decompressing and compressing and opening plain xml files should be enlightening. A.
Re: bug report
On 12 Mar 2001, Sebastian Fischmeister wrote: For some time now, I cannot use "show all" in some diagrams. In the attachment there is an example figure. It would be nice, if someone fixes this bug... assuming one of the developers hasn't already contacted you... which version is this and on which platform? Btw. you can get rid of the problem if you delete the y and z axis. And the diagram works with a CVS version prior to (about) 2001-02-21. A.
dia xml question
I was hoping somebody could shed some light on some of dia's XML. in particular the connecty lines (UML dependancy, inheritance, etc) Here is a small sample from from one of my TemplateToolkit templates (Use perl, use TT, be happy!). (This bit is fairly self explainatory) --- object type="UML - Dependency" version="0" id="[% dependancy.Id %]" attribute name="obj_pos" point val="9.74835,11.25"/ /attribute attribute name="obj_bb" rectangle val="8.89835,4.45;15.25,12.1"/ /attribute --- (this bit is odd) --- attribute name="orth_points" point val="number, number"/ point val="number, number"/ point val="number, number"/ point val="number, number"/ /attribute --- How do these points relate the orientation of the line - I am guessing, they represent the corners of a rectangle that the line(s) in within but how the line is drawn within the rectangle isn't indicated. (and so is this) --- attribute name="orth_orient" enum val="1"/ enum val="0"/ enum val="1"/ --- I am guessing that this sets how the line is drawn (ie up, left, up) or something but mentioning orthogonal and edges and plotting and algebra gives me a headache quite rapidly ;) would one of the xml hackers care to give a quick explaination of how these xmll elements effect the layout of elements in the diagram and better still would anybody involved in the xml be able to provide some annotated xml and dtd's. I would but I have reverse engineered the xml (hate reading DTD,s they are rarely much help) and don't really know it well enough to document it well. regards, A. ps autodial will be available from http://termisoc.org/~betty/projects/ some time before the end of the week, if not email me and moan til I put something up. :)
SQL and Dia
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.
Re: SQL and Dia
On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, Derek A. Neighbors wrote: 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 ;) You guys might want to look into gnome-db (http://www.gnome-db.org). It is quickly becoming the preferred data abstaction layer for GNOME. I believe its maintainer now works for Ximian. It is written in C and works quite nicely. Just an idea. Ah - but does it output as dia xml, hmm.. should submit a feature request (or better still a patch). my C isn't as good as my perl (ie I couldn't earn a living from it). gnome-db saving as dia xml would be very nice, however I'd probably still like to cron some auto-document script and vcs its results... but then I like that kind of thing. I'm having a couple of difficulties with the positioning of elements (creating them using TemplateToolkit perl is quite easy), positioning can be a bit tricky tho'. fortunately dia cleverly corrects mistakes in the xml when you manipulate an object. A.
