Dependency diagrams

Introduction

In most case, you just want to call kapidox with the "--dependency-diagrams" option. However, if you want finer-grained control over diagram generation or want to work on its code, read on.

depdiagram tools

Dependency diagram generation is done using two tools: src/depdiagram-prepare and src/depdiagram-generate. The way you use it is as follows.

1. Prepare dot files

You need to prepare Graphviz dot files for all frameworks with src/depdiagram-prepare. You can prepare dot files for all frameworks at once using:

depdiagram-prepare --all ~/src/frameworks ~/dots

This will generate many .dot files in ~/dots.

Or you can prepare dot files for a single framework with:

depdiagram-prepare --single ~/src/frameworks/myframework ~/dots

2. Generate the diagrams

You can now generate the dependency diagrams with src/depdiagram-generate. This tool accepts a list of dot files and outputs a combined dot file to stdout.

Here is how to generate a dependency diagram for all the frameworks:

depdiagram-generate ~/dots/*.dot | dot -Tpng > kf5.png

The diagram might be very hard to read though. For complex diagrams, you may want to pipe the output through the tred tool:

depdiagram-generate ~/dots/*.dot | tred | dot -Tpng > kf5.png

You can also generate the diagram for one particular framework using the "--framework" option:

depdiagram-generate ~/dots/*.dot --framework kcrash | tred | dot -Tpng > kcrash.png

To include Qt libs, use the "--qt" option:

depdiagram-generate ~/dots/tier*/*/*.dot --framework kcrash --qt | tred | dot -Tpng > kcrash.png

And to include targets within the framework, use the "--detailed" option:

depdiagram-generate ~/dots/*.dot --framework kcrash --detailed | tred | dot -Tpng > kcrash.png

Useful 3rd-party tools

tred, mentioned in the previous section, reduces clutter in dot files.

xdot can be used instead of dot to display the graph:

depdiagram-generate ~/dots/*.dot --framework kcrash --qt | tred | xdot

Generating all diagrams at once

You can use the depdiagram-generate-all tool to generate diagrams for all frameworks at once:

depdiagram-generate-all ~/dots ~/pngs

This command creates two pngs for each framework: "$framework.png" and "$framework-simplified.png" (same diagram, ran through tred). It also creates a diagram for all the frameworks, named "kf5.png".