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

What are Directives? 

Directives are a way of controlling how Mermaid acts from within the diagram's code. The significance of this is that these options are available to you while you're writing the diagram. The configuration options from the directives are applied on top of the site-wide configurations that are set while you're integrating or setting up Mermaid on the website. There are some configuration options that you cannot change via directives by default for security reasons. You can modify the list of options that cannot be changed by directives while setting up Mermaid on the website.

The reason why directives exist is that there are some diagram features you should be able to change at an individual diagram level; these should not just be switched on or off globally on the website. This could be an aspect of a diagram such as whether to show a title, or whether to display actor names at the top and bottom of a sequence diagram. These aspects are better...