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

Getting started with flowcharts

In this section, you will learn how to turn your diagram into a flowchart and how to set the direction your flowchart will be oriented in. When using Mermaid to draw flowcharts, you do not have to place the nodes yourself. Instead, you must provide the data of the flowchart to Mermaid through code. In this code, you specify what nodes there are in the flowchart and how they are connected to each other. With this information, Mermaid positions the nodes and draws the flowchart for you. Let's look closer at how to provide Mermaid with this data and the syntax of the diagram language.

The first thing Mermaid needs from your code is information about what type of diagram you are writing; this is the diagram type identifier. A flowchart has the graph type identifier of flowchart and will always start with that keyword. The flowchart keyword is followed by the direction of the flowchart. For example, the syntax could be something like flowchart TB...