ApexLib: Get a Page Flow Diagram of your application!

Question

Yesterday I came across Graphviz and remembered that a college had already used it to generate some ERDs/Class diagrams. After taking a closer look, I thought to give it a try and use it to generate a page flow diagram for an APEX application as you can also see it for JSF in JDeveloper.
It's part of the ApexLib Framework and it's FREE! ;-)
Get the details at http://inside-apex.blogspot.com/2007/01/apexlib-get-page-flow-diagram-of-your.html
A diagram sometimes says more than 1000 words... - Simple translation from german :-)
Have fun
Patrick
Check out my APEX-blog: http://inside-apex.blogspto.com

Answer 1

Hi Carl,
in the ApexLib_Generate_PageFlowDiagram.sql script you have the possibility to change the call to the Graphviz tool. According to there documentation the dot tool has several supported output format.
eg. '$dot -Tpng -o%filename.png -Tsvg -o%filename.svg %filename.dot'would produce a PNG and a SVG file. There is no option for PDF, but in there FAQs (http://www.graphviz.org/doc/FAQ.html) they have the following workaround. They first create a Postscript output and then use a Postscript2PDF converter to get the PDF output. On LINUX it would probably look like
'$dot -Tps -o%filename.ps | epsf2pdf -o %filename.pdf'On Windows you have to get a PDF converter and the hole call in the script would look like
BEGIN
    ApexLib_PageFlowDiagram.generateCommands
      ( pGraphvizCommand      => '$dot -Tps -o%filename.ps %filename.dot'||CHR(10)||
                                 '$pdfconverter %filename.ps %filename.pdf'
      , pSkipSelfReference    => TRUE
      , pSkipDynamicReference => TRUE
      , pSkipSharedComponents => TRUE
END;Hope this helps
Patrick
Check out my APEX-blog: http://inside-apex.blogspot.com