Domain Reverse Mapper (DRM)

Automatically generate Graphviz diagram from your domain classes.

Using reflection, Domain Reverse Mapper scans your packages that contain your domain entities. It then builds a graph of entity compositions and inheritances and creates a Graphviz .dot file from that.

The picture above is generated from a simple example domain with Domain Reverse Mapper. In the above picture

• black arrows describe composition (private field in one class refers to another domain class
• empty arrows show inheritance
• each package is grouped as a subgraph

Benefits

• use code as forward thinking documentation to model your domain
• always have up-to-date diagram of your domain model
• use the diagram to help in discussions with your team and stakeholders

Usage

This tool can be either used manually from command line or as a maven plugin hooked to your build process.

Using from command-line

Download the latest executable .jar from Releases. Run this archive in classpath that also contains your domain model classes. So let's say your domain model is in domain.jar, you can execute Domain Reverse Modeler with

java -cp domain.jar:drm-core-1.3.jar com.nitorcreations.DomainMapperCli -p com.mycompany.domain

This will scan all classes under the package com.mycompany.domain and output the .dot file to your console output. If you want to write it to file use switch -f filename.dot. If you need to scan multiple packages use format -p "com.package1, com.package2".

Use the generated .dot file with your local Graphviz or any of the online Graphviz tools to show your domain diagram.

NOTE! Do not use java -jar as this will override the classpath provided by -cp switch so your domain classes won't get included and the produced graph will be empty.

Using with Maven

Add to your pom.xml the following:

<build>
	<plugins>
		<plugin>
			<groupId>com.nitorcreations</groupId>
			<artifactId>drm-maven-plugin</artifactId>
			<version>1.3</version>
			<configuration>
				<packages>
					<param>com.mycompany.domain</param>
					<param>com.mycompany.other_domain</param>
				</packages>
			</configuration>
			<executions>
				<execution>
					<phase>process-classes</phase>
					<goals>
						<goal>map</goal>
					</goals>
				</execution>
			</executions>
		</plugin>
	</plugins>
</build>

where the packages configuration parameter contains a list of packages that should be scanned for domain graph.

When process-classes life-cycle phase gets executed, your domain model graph will be saved to /target/domainmodel.dot. Use this file with your local Graphviz or any of the online Graphviz tools to show your domain diagram.