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

Technical requirements

In this chapter, we will look at how to use Mermaid to generate state diagrams. For most of these examples, you only need an editor with support for Mermaid. A good editor that is easy to access is Mermaid Live Editor, which can be found online at https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid-live-editor/, and only requires your browser to be running.

All the examples in this chapter have been created using the second version of state diagrams in Mermaid (SDV2). The second version is backward compatible with the first version, (SDV1), but adds many features not available in SDV1, such as choices and directions. From version 8.11 of Mermaid, SDV2 will be the default state diagram and you can use the examples in this chapter without changes. With earlier versions of Mermaid, you need to start the diagram code with stateDiagram-v2 instead of stateDiagram in order to select the correct version.