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Plantuml

Plantuml is first and foremost a markup language that enables the quick creation of diagrams through processing textual files. It is extremely easy to learn, and very powerful… well as powerful as a diagram processing language can be. After all, it isn’t curing cancer.

The best place to find out more knowledge, or anything about plantuml is the website.

The main purpose for creating this page was to provide some quick references for commonly used features of plantuml. If you must, you can call it a cheatsheet of sorts.

Diagram Types

If you have ever created a diagram before, you generally need to know what type of diagram you are trying to create before going about and created one. Plantuml offers several types, and if you do not see what you are looking for, understand that the type of diagram maybe titled something different from what you are looking for.

The different types for diagrams in Plantuml are:

• Sequence
• Use Case
• Class
• Activity
• Component
• State
• Object
• Deployment
• Timing
• Regex
• Network
• Wireframe
• Archimate
• Gantt
• Chronoloy
• MindMap
• WBS
• Json
• Yaml

Activity Diagram

The Activity diagram is one of diagram types offered by Plantuml, another name for it could be “Process”, which is oddly always what I mistakenly think it is. As usual, plantuml requires a @startuml, and a @enduml to denote where the markup language begins and ends. Generally, there two are paired with start and stop or end, although these two are not required, and sometimes need to be left out. Element labels are denoted with a : at the beginning, and a ; at the end.

Keywords

Network Diagrams

Network Diagrams in Plantuml take on a form very similar to Json. As with all plantuml diagram files, the block of code containing the diagram is nested between a @startuml and a @enduml. Within a network diagram the entire diagram is nested within a nwdiag label followed by two curly brackets { and }. Networks are declared by the network keyword, followed by the name of the network, and everything pertaining to that network nested within a pair of curly brackets. Addresses are designated with the address keyword, and so forth. Just as with Json, lines of code can be commented out with / and / respectively.

Keywords

Deployment Diagrams

Deployment diagrams are whole other beast than both network and activity diagrams, as they can display very complex relationships in an extremely easy manner. Except for the standard @startuml and @enduml, they primarily consist of keyword / value pairs. The kicker is the cornicopea of keywords available for use. These keywords represent a variating degree of objects, items, and stuff. A line is then used to demonstrate the relationship.

For more info go to the plantuml website for a better demonstrations.

Class Diagrams

Plantuml’s class diagram schema is intended to be intuitive and multilingual, and incorporates features any programmer would be comfortable with. Yet, from the perspective of someone who did not go the traditional route and learn Java or C++ in a formal setting, many of these features are not familiar at all, and possess either obscure or ambiguious meaning. So for this reason, some jargon needs to be sorted.

Element Types

Relationships

Class Types

When reading the Plantuml documentation on class diagrams, the first thing one might scratch their head at is the need to distinguish different class types. From personal experience this was encountered first learning Zig, but let’s not digress.

@startuml example diagram
class Example Class {
    +{static} int something
    -{abstract} void method()
    ~void packagePrivateMethod()
    #{abstract} char protectedMethod(int param)
    }
@enduml

Themes

Plantuml provides several “themes” that bring color, style, and overall pazazz to the diagram. To find the theme that best suits you, head over to the theme gallery.

Style

Plantuml also allows customizing the style of the diagram to one’s taste or as needed. Similar to css in an html file, plantuml uses the flags <style> and </style> to define the beginning and end of style configurations. The target characteristic is followed by a pair of squigly brackets, and contained within is the designation of style parameters. Styling differs according to diagram type and preselected theme. So, please checkout the plantuml site on how to do this properly.