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

Understanding Requirement Diagrams

In this section, we will cover the different components of a requirement diagram. You will learn how to define a requirement and its attributes in mermaid code. You will also learn how to define an element that represents an external document reference or entity and how to link them to a requirement. You will learn about different types of relationships in a requirement diagram, and how to declare those in Mermaid.

The first step here, as in any other Mermaid diagram code, is to provide the diagram identifier keyword, requirementDiagram, which tells the Mermaid parser that you want to draw a requirement diagram. The definition of all other components will come after this keyword only. Now let's start going through requirement definitions and the possible types of requirements.

Defining Requirements

Requirements are the building blocks of the requirement diagram. They are represented graphically by a rectangular box, which showcases their...