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Diagrams as Code (medium.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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How often do you build and edit Entity Relationship Diagrams? If the answer is ‘more often than I’d like’, and you’re fed up with tweaking your diagrams, take <5 minutes to read my latest article on building your diagrams with code. Track their changes in GitHub, have them build as part of your CI/CD pipeline, and even drop them into your dbt docs if you like.

This is a ‘friends and family’ link, so it’ll bypass the usual Medium paywall.

I’m not affiliated to the tool I’ve chosen in any way. Just like how it works.

Let me know yours thoughts!

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (5 children)

This is a good first step. The next step is to think about dependencies in the build process; to what degree can the diagram be used to implement the rest of the system?

One difficulty with using Mermaid this way is a loss of machine-readable formal information. Mermaid is focused on markup and cosmetics, which is great for presentation, but not great for machine-readability. I don't know if there are any better alternatives, though; it's not common for presentation formats to have machine-readable structures.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

UML can be compiled to code using some tools, would that address this? Or is your thought that it would build code and push to production systems?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

UML is an interesting case; I think that UML Structure diagrams can be compiled, but not the others. This is because UML describes both buildtime and runtime connections between entities, and specifying runtime entities with UML runs into declarative existential claims which are not obviously compilable into static code.

In any case, I'm only thinking about the build step. I think modern applications should be chimeric; they should be built from many modules written in many languages. For example, many compilers and interpreters include at least one page of Zephyr ASDL, which is excellent for the singular task of describing ASTs and ADTs but not anything else.

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