Rails - May 2005 - Structure graphs

Moin!

I just wrote a relatively simple database structure graph generator and 
decided that it would be a good idea to share it.

It uses the neato tool from graphviz for generating the actual graph. 
Graphviz is available from http://www.graphviz.org/

You can get the script itself at 
http://flgr.0x42.net/structure/structure.erb

It should be placed in /scripts and is invoked like this:

   erb structure.erb > structure.dot
   neato structure.dot -Tpng -o structure.png

Sample graphs:

- My own ecommerce system:
     http://flgr.0x42.net/structure/structure.png

- technoweenie''s comics portal:
     http://flgr.0x42.net/structure/comiclog-structure.png

- danp''s integrated user account manager:
     http://glueless.net/structure.png

While prettiness and quality of these graphs is still not perfect, they 
still are useful for getting a quick overview over the database structure.

I know that there is commercial software that can do this, but I think 
having this functionality available freely (even if at inferior quality) 
is still a good thing.

If you generate a graph using this, please post the URL -- I''m 
interested in seeing other people''s designs as well. :)

If you are familiar with graphviz and know how I could get the arrows to 
avoid overlapping even the boxes they come from / go to, please tell.

If you have any other ideas for improving this, please let me know and 
I''ll have a look.

License is the same as Ruby''s of course, so modify and use this in 
whatever way you want.

Regards,
Florian Gross

On Sat, 2005-05-14 at 22:00 +0200, Florian Groß wrote:
> Moin!
> 
> I just wrote a relatively simple database structure graph generator and 
> decided that it would be a good idea to share it.
Thanks! This is really outstanding work. It''s going to be very helpful!
> It uses the neato tool from graphviz for generating the actual graph. 
> Graphviz is available from http://www.graphviz.org/
On Debian apt-get install graphviz makes short work of this 
(don''t know about other distro repositories)
> It should be placed in /scripts and is invoked like this:
> 
>    erb structure.erb > structure.dot
>    neato structure.dot -Tpng -o structure.png
Couldn''t be easier!
> License is the same as Ruby''s of course, so modify and use this in
> whatever way you want.
Makes for excellent studying, too . The scary thing is (for me) that
alot of it is making sense! Thanks again, Florian!

Howard