Book Image

The Official Guide to Mermaid.js

By : Knut Sveidqvist, Ashish Jain
Book Image

The Official Guide to Mermaid.js

By: Knut Sveidqvist, Ashish Jain

Overview of this book

Mermaid is a JavaScript-based charting and diagramming tool that lets you represent diagrams using text and code, which simplifies the maintenance of complex diagrams. This is a great option for developers as they’re more familiar with code, rather than using special tools for generating diagrams. Besides, diagrams in code simplify maintenance and ensure that the code is supported by version control systems. In some cases, Mermaid makes refactoring support for name changes possible while also enabling team collaboration for review distribution and updates. Developers working with any system will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide to using Mermaid for documentation. The book is also a great reference for looking up the syntax for specific diagrams when authoring diagrams. You’ll start by learning the importance of accurate and visual documentation. Next, the book introduces Mermaid and establishes how to use it to create effective documentation. By using different tools, editors, or a custom documentation platform, you’ll also understand how to use Mermaid syntax for various diagrams. Later chapters cover advanced configuration settings and theme options to manipulate your diagram as per your needs. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with Mermaid diagrams and how they can be used in your workflows.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Mermaid
7
Section 2: The Most Popular Diagrams
12
Section 3: Powerful Diagrams for the Advanced User

Defining a class, members, and relationships

In this section, you will learn about classes and what their UML representation looks like. You will learn the syntax of defining a class, be exposed to different ways of adding members to a class, and will find out about different types of relationships among classes and how to represent them while using Mermaid. One of the biggest advantages of using Mermaid to create a class diagram is that you do not have to worry about the positioning of the individual classes or members and relationship edges/connecting lines while rendering the diagram—Mermaid takes care of all this. So, you just need to define classes and focus on how they are structured as per a well-predefined syntax, and Mermaid will render a nice-looking diagram for you based on your inputs.

Now, let's first understand how a class is represented, and then we will have a closer look at the syntax of defining a class in Mermaid in the next section.

How is a Class...