Some years ago I wrote a small tool for creating OmniGraffle UML diagrams directly from Java source code. Visualizing Java is nice, but since I'm often use ecore/Xcore to define my models, I wanted a tool to also nicely visualize EMF based models.
I have now extended my tool, j2og, to also create UML class diagrams from ecore or Xcore models. Below you see a (manually layouted) version of an automatically generated diagram of the ecore library example.
j2og does not layout the diagram, since OmniGraffle provides some nice layout algorithms anyway. When creating the diagram, you can tweak the output with several settings. For example
- show or hide attribute and operation compartments
- show context, optionally grayed out -- the context are classifiers defined in an external package
- show package names, omit common package prefixes etc.
- and more
Note that besides OmniGraffle, you can open the diagrams with other tools (Diagrammix, Lucidchart) as well. See the j2og github page for details. You can install the tool via update site or Eclipse marketplace link.
The following image (click to enlarge) is the result of exporting a large Xcore model defining the AST of N4JS, a statically typed version of JavaScript. I have exported it and applied the hierarchy layout algorithm -- no other manual tweaks were applied. Of course, this diagram is probably too large to be really useable, but it is a great start to document (parts) of the model. Well, in case of an AST you probably prefer using an EBNF grammar ;-)
PS: Of course you could use ecoretools to create an UML diagram. I usually need the diagrams for documentation purposes. In that case, OmniGraffle simply is so much better since it is easier to use and the diagrams look so much nicer, (sorry, ecoretools).
