What about importing from XMI to generate a plantuml text file?

Question

Hello,

I think it would be useful to have a tool to convert XMI to PLANTUML format.

For example I can generate an XMI from PHP_UML tool (my own use case) then pass it to the tool to have it transformed to a plantuml file.

Then use plantuml to generate the graph.

What do you think about that?

Answer 1

Sound like a good idea!

The issue with XMI is that it's not so easy to read. If you succeed in writting such a tool, we would definitely add it to our http://plantuml.com/running page !

Comments

I would like to but currently I have no time to build it nor my company would finance that time for this purpose. It was just an idea to share, to see if the an automatic "pipeline" from source code to UML diagram it is something that is of interest for the community. Anyway thank you for your answer.

I thought about plantuml because it is an easy format to read, to commit to a git repo or to make a diff of it. It would be a nice thing to have an UML diagram that can be automatically generated and stay with the source code.

It would also fit in a Continuous Integration environment; a typical makefile may seem like this:
PHP_UML (or any language 2 XMI tool) -> XMI2PLANTUML tool -> PLANTUML -> DIAGRAM

---

Since PlantUML has an alpha -xmi (and -xmi:argo and -xmi:star) flag for export/save, maybe some ground job was already done towards this in the codebase? Would it be hard to "reverse" the export process into import?