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

Grouping the steps into sections

So far, you have seen that different steps are shown in the order they are inserted, but they are rendered in a similar manner—that is, with the same color. Sometimes, it may make more sense to group some of the related steps together into sections. Each section would act as a parent of the different steps under it and represent a specific phase in the user journey. It could also be used to tag the different steps to a specific category type.

In Mermaid, you define a section by using the section keyword. The syntax of adding a section is quite simple, as we can see here:

section SECTION_NAME

Here, you start on a new line with the section keyword, followed by a SECTION_NAME string. The section name should be an alphanumeric string value, and everything after the section keyword is treated as SECTION_NAME, which will be displayed as the title of the section.

To link a step under a specific section, simply define that step after the...