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Re: Output of a FLowchart from XML

Subject: Re: Output of a FLowchart from XML
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 05 Mar 2004 14:49:55 -0500
svg flowchart
Hi Sam,

At 01:35 PM 3/5/2004, you wrote:
We have created a DTD defining a procedure-like source document (I suppose
it's now a new Markup Language?) and stylesheets to output the three kinds
of formats listed above (although we're not done with them; still working on
item 3).  However, our main client (who has been quite happy with our
product so far) has asked if we can output Flowcharts corresponding to the
software files of item 3.

Initially, I quickly abandoned SVG or Visio XML as it looked like the
stylesheets would have to "create the drawings" and line connections along
with where they need to appear on the page.  This sounds like a lot of code.
The other option we've been looking into is flowcharting applications that
support some kind of text-to-flowchart capabilities.  We think we have a
working solution here, but it requires extra steps to get to the final
output (graphic files to eventually end up in the Word documents of item 2).
The process would be something like a) stylesheets to output text in the
flowcharter's "syntax", b) open each file in the flowcharting application,
c) do some touch-up work within the app, d) save and export to JPEG or
similar format).

This is really interesting. It's both a "classic" application of a markup language (documentary data, multiple output formats) and a new and challenging one (those auto-generated flowcharts).


I'll be really interested to see what others say wrt the question of specific flowcharting applications, and how much of the functionality you need is available off the shelf. But I wouldn't give up on the first idea so quickly. While challenging, I do not believe a pure SVG application such as you describe would be too much for XML/XSLT. On the contrary, it could be really nice and slick. Yet as you think about how it would develop, I do think you will find it profitable to break out the problem into several stages. For example, if you defined a set of "flowchart primitives", you could target a format (markup language) designed to represent them with transformations out of the source format that documents the procedures. (If you've worked with XSL-FO, you can think of this as an analogous architecture where your flowchart ML serves as an intermediate format between your XML and your SVG flowcharts.) Then you need only a reusable transformation for the FlowchartML -> SVG "formatting" stage -- which itself might have to be in two or more stages, given the vagaries of diagram-drawing with XSLT (yes it's a pain, but pipelining transformations is a very powerful approach for this kind of thing, and we're talking about a single stylesheet that would have to be written once). Because your FlowchartML would be a clean, abstract representation of a flowchart, deriving this from your ultimate source format would be considerably easier than building and maintaining transforms that went straight into SVG.

It occurred to me that if there exists the right bundle of tools somewhere,
perhaps we could use SVG in some way as to bypass a number of manual steps
associated with the flowcharting application.  Any ideas?

In principle the idea appears quite sound. It also seems like it would be general-purpose enough to get support in the marketplace -- and indeed, that someone somewhere may already be developing to this market. If you haven't already, you should Google for XML, flowcharts, SVG, XSLT. And if we're lucky we'll hear more ... watch this space.


Cheers,
Wendell


====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ======================================================================


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