Autograph Annoucement (ERD Tool)

Colin Fox wrote:

Hello everyone.

There were a number of people asking about ERD tools here a while ago,
so I decided to publish one that I've put together.

It's called Autograph, and you can find it on the pg foundry:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/autograph/

Cool! Nice to have a new option available. I'll definitely check it out.

Autograph is really just an XSL stylesheet, used in combination with
graphviz, xsltproc, convert and the downloadXml.py program from Scott
Kirkwood's xmltoddl package.

The documentation page, including a couple of example diagrams, is here:

http://pgfoundry.org/docman/view.php/1000360/4848/readme.html

From the example page:

"I also wanted to make sure that there were "no dead crows" -- having
the crows-feet right side up makes the diagram a lot more readable in my
humble opinion."

Um ... those arrows look backwards to me :-(

Colin Fox wrote:

There were a number of people asking about ERD tools here a while ago,
so I decided to publish one that I've put together.

It's called Autograph, and you can find it on the pg foundry:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/autograph/

Looks handy. I'd like to give it a try.

Autograph is really just an XSL stylesheet, used in combination with
graphviz, xsltproc, convert and the downloadXml.py program from Scott
Kirkwood's xmltoddl package.

I'm familiar with graphviz and xsltproc, but what is convert? Is this
Imagemagick's convert?

I hope not... Debian says I need 36 packages for that.

Colin

Colin Wetherbee wrote:

Colin Fox wrote:

Autograph is really just an XSL stylesheet, used in combination with
graphviz, xsltproc, convert and the downloadXml.py program from Scott
Kirkwood's xmltoddl package.

I'm familiar with graphviz and xsltproc, but what is convert? Is this
Imagemagick's convert?

NetPBM seems to work with it, if the convert line in diagrams/Makefile
is changed to the following.

@pstopnm -stdout $@ | pnmtopng > $(subst .ps,.png,$@)

Don't forget the tab at the beginning.

Right now, all I get are three 1175-byte PNG files with the words
"Generated by Auto Graph" in them, though.

I'll play around with it more later.

Colin

Colin Wetherbee wrote:

Colin Wetherbee wrote:

Colin Fox wrote:

Autograph is really just an XSL stylesheet, used in combination with
graphviz, xsltproc, convert and the downloadXml.py program from Scott
Kirkwood's xmltoddl package.

I'm familiar with graphviz and xsltproc, but what is convert? Is
this Imagemagick's convert?

NetPBM seems to work with it, if the convert line in diagrams/Makefile
is changed to the following.

@pstopnm -stdout $@ | pnmtopng > $(subst .ps,.png,$@)

Don't forget the tab at the beginning.

Right now, all I get are three 1175-byte PNG files with the words
"Generated by Auto Graph" in them, though.

I'll play around with it more later.

Colin

I probably should change this from "requires convert" to "currently uses
convert to convert from PS to PNG, but you can use whatever you want, or
just leave them in PS if you like".

I'm converting from PS, by the way, because although I love graphviz's
diagramming capability, it's PNG output is "crappy" :).

Regards,
cf

brian wrote:

Colin Fox wrote:

Hello everyone.

There were a number of people asking about ERD tools here a while ago,
so I decided to publish one that I've put together.

It's called Autograph, and you can find it on the pg foundry:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/autograph/

Cool! Nice to have a new option available. I'll definitely check it out.

Autograph is really just an XSL stylesheet, used in combination with
graphviz, xsltproc, convert and the downloadXml.py program from Scott
Kirkwood's xmltoddl package.

The documentation page, including a couple of example diagrams, is here:

http://pgfoundry.org/docman/view.php/1000360/4848/readme.html

From the example page:

"I also wanted to make sure that there were "no dead crows" -- having
the crows-feet right side up makes the diagram a lot more readable in
my humble opinion."

Um ... those arrows look backwards to me :-(

Actually, crows feet are supposed to look like... the feet of crows --
ie a three-line triangle at the bottom and the line rising from it. All
the connectors on that diagram follow this convention except for the
mickey-mouse ear on the comments table.

Regards,
cf

Colin Wetherbee wrote:

Colin Wetherbee wrote:

Colin Fox wrote:

Autograph is really just an XSL stylesheet, used in combination with
graphviz, xsltproc, convert and the downloadXml.py program from Scott
Kirkwood's xmltoddl package.

I'm familiar with graphviz and xsltproc, but what is convert? Is
this Imagemagick's convert?

NetPBM seems to work with it, if the convert line in diagrams/Makefile
is changed to the following.

@pstopnm -stdout $@ | pnmtopng > $(subst .ps,.png,$@)

Don't forget the tab at the beginning.

Right now, all I get are three 1175-byte PNG files with the words
"Generated by Auto Graph" in them, though.

Can you look at the PS file, and make sure that you're at least getting
a legitimate postscript diagram?

Colin Fox wrote:

Colin Wetherbee wrote:

Colin Wetherbee wrote:

Colin Fox wrote:

Autograph is really just an XSL stylesheet, used in combination with
graphviz, xsltproc, convert and the downloadXml.py program from Scott
Kirkwood's xmltoddl package.

I'm familiar with graphviz and xsltproc, but what is convert? Is
this Imagemagick's convert?

NetPBM seems to work with it, if the convert line in diagrams/Makefile
is changed to the following.

@pstopnm -stdout $@ | pnmtopng > $(subst .ps,.png,$@)

Don't forget the tab at the beginning.

Right now, all I get are three 1175-byte PNG files with the words
"Generated by Auto Graph" in them, though.

Can you look at the PS file, and make sure that you're at least getting
a legitimate postscript diagram?

It turned out I had incorrectly added my schema information.

Works now, with NetPBM.

Cool tool!

Thanks.

Also, is there a way to forcibly remove tables and views from the
output? In all.xml, I only list the tables I want, but in addition to
those, I also get my PostGIS tables and all the views I've created
within the schema.

Colin

Colin Wetherbee wrote:

Also, is there a way to forcibly remove tables and views from the
output? In all.xml, I only list the tables I want, but in addition to
those, I also get my PostGIS tables and all the views I've created
within the schema.

And...

If I set the tablemode to "detailed", all the lines terminate at primary
keys, instead of terminating at a primary key and a foreign key, which,
I assume, is what should happen.

An example...

TABLE mytable
id PRIMARY KEY
foo_id REFERENCES foo(id)

TABLE foo
id PRIMARY KEY

The output of your tool would show a link between mytable.id and foo.id,
instead of a link between mytable.foo_id and foo.id.

I don't think I'll use the detailed view very often, though; I just
wanted to see what it did. :)

Here's the sample "detailed" output from one of my databases:

http://colinwetherbee.com/data/js-20080403.png

Thanks again for this neat, lean tool.

Colin

Colin Fox wrote:

brian wrote:

From the example page:

"I also wanted to make sure that there were "no dead crows" -- having
the crows-feet right side up makes the diagram a lot more readable in
my humble opinion."

Um ... those arrows look backwards to me :-(

Actually, crows feet are supposed to look like... the feet of crows --
ie a three-line triangle at the bottom and the line rising from it. All
the connectors on that diagram follow this convention except for the
mickey-mouse ear on the comments table.

I was kidding. No joke: i screwed up my smiley!

b

am Thu, dem 03.04.2008, um 15:40:41 -0700 mailte Colin Fox folgendes:

Hello everyone.

There were a number of people asking about ERD tools here a while ago,
so I decided to publish one that I've put together.

It's called Autograph, and you can find it on the pg foundry:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/autograph/

I have added the url to the fine IRC-docbot:

09:47 < akretschmer> ??erd
09:47 < rtfm_please> For information about erd
09:47 < rtfm_please> see http://druid.sf.net/
09:47 < rtfm_please> or http://schemaspy.sourceforge.net/
09:47 < rtfm_please> or http://uml.sourceforge.net/index.php
09:47 < akretschmer> ?learn erd http://pgfoundry.org/projects/autograph/

Andreas
--
Andreas Kretschmer
Kontakt: Heynitz: 035242/47150, D1: 0160/7141639 (mehr: -> Header)
GnuPG-ID: 0x3FFF606C, privat 0x7F4584DA http://wwwkeys.de.pgp.net

Colin Wetherbee wrote:

Can you look at the PS file, and make sure that you're at least getting
a legitimate postscript diagram?

It turned out I had incorrectly added my schema information.

Works now, with NetPBM.

Cool tool!

Glad you like it. I've found it personally indispensable. :)

Thanks.

Also, is there a way to forcibly remove tables and views from the
output? In all.xml, I only list the tables I want, but in addition to
those, I also get my PostGIS tables and all the views I've created
within the schema.

Colin

If you look in the autograph.xsl stylesheet, you'll see excludetables &
excludeschemas. I started work on this, but got bogged down in exactly
what the xsl for that would be.

If you want to get it working and send me the patches, I'll be more than
happy to apply them and give you attribution. ;)

Colin Wetherbee wrote:

Colin Wetherbee wrote:

Also, is there a way to forcibly remove tables and views from the
output? In all.xml, I only list the tables I want, but in addition
to those, I also get my PostGIS tables and all the views I've created
within the schema.

And...

If I set the tablemode to "detailed", all the lines terminate at
primary keys, instead of terminating at a primary key and a foreign
key, which, I assume, is what should happen.

Yes, this is odd. I don't actually use the detailed view myself. Once I
got it working, I never really found a need for it. So I haven't looked
at a detailed diagram for some time. However, I do remember it working,
and I know that I've put code in to connect the various fields, so I'm
not sure at what point it got broken.