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 explore how to use Mermaid to generate flowcharts. For most of these examples, you will only need an editor with support for Mermaid. A good editor that is easy to access is Mermaid Live Editor, which can be found at https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid-live-editor. It only requires your browser to run. For demonstrating some of the functionality, where we will be exploring interaction, you will need to have a web page open that you can add JavaScript functions to. An easy way to experiment with this is to continue with the Adding Mermaid to a simple web page example from Chapter 2, How to Use Mermaid, and apply the additional code to that page.

Another thing to be aware of is that in this chapter, the shapes in the flowchart will be called nodes, while the lines between the nodes will be called edges. In the following image, you can see a couple of nodes with different shapes connected by an edge:

Figure 6.1 – An illustration of a node and an edge

Figure...