PlantUML Q&A - Recent questions and answers in Won't implement

Answered: how to drow the collaboration diagram

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 09:20:54 +0000

Hello V.,

See some doc. here:

plantuml.com/deployment-diagram

Regards,
Th.

concurrency flow in activity diagram

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 03:49:15 +0000

I want to create two concurrent flows in an activity diagram, but these two flows do not need to be synchronized. The scenario can be something like this, a go routine (let's call it MAIN) starts a new go routine to do a separate service, and then the MAIN go routine continues, no synchronization between them at all. how to do that? AFAIK, according to UML activity specification, a join node do synchronization intrinsically, while a merge node is related to several alternative flows before. There seems to be no proper design for the above scenario, neither does plantUML. Thanks!

Answered: State Diagram: Change the shape of states

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 09:39:26 +0000

Like this? Or do you want a circle shape with the name in, like this?

Vertical fork

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 07:47:15 +0000

Hello everyone,

Could anyone help me with writing vertical fork and join for activity diagram?

It would be great if you write a script by taking a simple example (Please with legacy ACTIVITY DIAGRAM)

Answered: how to programmatically generate diagram?

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 17:58:30 +0000

I found

https://plantuml.com/en/api

Answered: Sorting based on visibilty

Fri, 16 Mar 2018 19:44:39 +0000

Sorting is made by the order the nodes are declared and also by their edges connections, there's no other way to order nodes.

Answered: Can PlantUML output dot files?

Thu, 22 Feb 2018 09:49:05 +0000

No, Graphviz is only used for node placement.

Answered: Can I reverse engineer classes in python code and automatically create a class diagram?

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:47:40 +0000

PlantUML can't do it.

You may use Doxygen to do it.

Answered: Allow line breaks before { and inside !define parameters

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 17:34:00 +0000

Unfortunately, PlantUML is very sensitive about line break.

It's not easy to change this behavior, so the better option is to put back your two lines on a single line.

Sorry about that!

Answered: Does sequence diagram support grouping messages from specified participant(s)?

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 05:56:44 +0000

Hi,

Sorry, I am not sure to understand the need.

Could you use an image editor to edit the following image and to show us what you are expecting :

Thanks!

Answered: How can we "force" the location of the arrow start in activity diagram

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 08:01:40 +0000

No, you cannot force it.

The direction is computed by a determinist algorithm (so no random).
In general, the action after the "then" in on left, the one after the "else" is on right.

There are exception, especially if one branch is a simple "stop".
Example:

http://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/uml/5Omn3i0W3CJsUqL66Bl2GiS-0vKWa2Yf8Fo_r8lbnM5g7BgUXYkJYRTMwOSbBTp9w5XiCLLUS9jC9iSj2_fnIUZqu9vgXfEb7c77Ndq0

@startuml
If (action1) then (true)
stop
else (false)
:do A;
endif
:out;
@enduml

The algorithm is not perfect and we can improve it.
So you can post here some examples that does not work well.

Answered: Please provide node shadows in DOT diagrams

Thu, 21 Apr 2016 05:58:54 +0000

Thanks for the suggestion, but it's very unlikely that shadows will be added to DOT diagram elements.

The reason why is that DOT diagrams are generated by GraphViz, and the source code of GraphViz is not hosted or modified by PlantUML team. You should ask the Graphviz team (http://www.graphviz.org/content/graphviz-issue-tracker) for this feature.

Sorry about that!

Answered: Is there a way or a tool that can convert Visio graphs or SVG images to PlantUML?

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:39:19 +0000

Hello,

No, there are no such tool, and it seems very difficult to implement.

The only only way to do that is manual port.

Regards,

Answered: Does a grammar exist for the language?

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 11:06:49 +0000

No, there is no BNF grammar. Parsing is done by regular expression.

You will find some information here http://plantuml.sourceforge.net/developpers.html about checking syntax of a text file.

The -syntax flag may be usefull for developping integration with IntelliJ, and if you wish, we could also provide an API to allow syntax checking from Java code.