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

Interaction and styling

In this section, we will look at how to add custom styles to your flowchart. For instance, you may want to highlight one particular node in some way outside the theme. You will also learn how to make it possible for users to interact with your diagrams using mouse clicks. In the next subsection, we will start by going into details about adding interaction to diagrams.

Interaction

When flowcharts reach a certain size, they start to manifest several problems. Their original simplicity, which is one of the fundamental strengths of flowcharts, turns into complexity and the flowchart becomes hard to read, maintain, and render. One way of dealing with this issue is to break up the flowchart into smaller units, such as subprocesses or subroutines. With Mermaid, it is possible to link nodes to another URL, which allows you to link a subroutine in the top-level flowchart to another page displaying the subroutine. This can be accomplished with the click keyword...