Generate full class diagram using GraphViz and Doxygen

1
votes

I'm currently working on my internship, and for the company's sake I decided to just go ahead on the programming work. For my current internship that seemed to fit better than to create all kinds of diagrams no one gets or uses.

Now I ran into a problem though. 4 weeks of internship and 50 java-classes later my school decided they want to see a class diagram. I've already got doxygen set up with GraphViz to generate partial class diagrams, with the focus on only one of the classes and it's associations. But what I wonder is, is it possible to generate one class diagram containing all relations from all classes? Or am I gonna have to try to convince my school that this way the class diagrams have better readability?

1
doxygengraphvizclass-diagram

1 Answers

2
votes

The short answer is that this is not possible. Doxygen parses the code and includes only classes in the diagrams which are in any direct or indirect relationship with the documented class. A general class diagram containing all classes and their associations is not generated by doxygen.

Play araound with the diagram options of doxygen to see with graphs make sense for you (either using the "doxywizard" [Wizard tab -> Diagrams or Expert tab -> Dot] or as I prefer editing directly the doxyfile).

I don't believe that a class diagram with more than 50 classes makes sense, because this would result in a hard to read diagram which is more confusing than helping. (Generally it might be better to organize your code in packages which you might document using the grouping feature of doxygen. In that case you could use the collaboration diagrams to show more high level relations between the packages.)

Another approach might be using a UML/CASE tool to generate UML diagrams from your code (e.g. Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems, you could import your code and let the tool generate class diagrams out of it). You could include such generated graphs by exporting that graphs as picures and including that pictures in your doxygen generated documentation using the \image tag.

I hope this helps.