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Welcome to the visualee wiki.

Quickstart - visualee for the impatient

A video about visualee from Adam Bien.

An example graph of the opensource project lightfish.

What is visualee?

Visualee is a maven plugin to visualize the cdi- and jpa-dependencies of a java ee project.

It addresses questions like:

How could i get an overview of a java ee project?
Who fires events and who is observing it?
How could i visualize JPA-Relations?
Who is producing classes and where are they injected?
Which resources are injected?
...

How to include visualee in your mavenproject

visualee is available on maven central. Add this to your pom:

         <plugin>
            <groupId>de.struller-baumann</groupId>
            <artifactId>visualee</artifactId>
            <version>0.27-SNAPSHOT</version>
            <configuration>
               <outputdirectory>visualee</outputdirectory>
            </configuration>
            <executions>
               <execution>
                  <phase>process-resources</phase>
                  <goals>
                     <goal>visualize</goal>
                  </goals>
               </execution>
            </executions>
         </plugin>

To use SNAPSHOT-Versions you must also include this into your POM:

   <pluginRepositories>
      <pluginRepository>
         <id>sonatype.snapshots</id>
         <url>https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/</url>
      </pluginRepository>
   </pluginRepositories>

How to use visualee

After including visualee in your pom, simply build your project. The visualization will be generated in a project outputdirectory called "visualee". In the log should be something like:

[visualee:visualize]
#######################################################
### VisualEE-Plugin
### Analyzing sourcefolder: /[your project path]
### Generating graphs
### Done, visualization can be found in
### /[your project path]/visualee/index.html
#######################################################

Open the generated index.html in your browser and select one of the generated graphs. In the index.html is a quick help (click to open it) about using the GUI.

It is recommended to use the google chrome browser, due to it's javascript performance and HTML5-capabilities. It's only tested with chrome version >= 28.0.1500.71 and firefox version >= 22.

FAQ

There are no classes displayed

Ensure that the browser could open local files (e.g. for chrome „google-chrome %U –allow-file-access-from-files“). Or serve the visualee-folder via http (e.g. python -m SimpleHTTPServer).

How to configure the graphs

It is possible to configure the graphs individually. The attributes are:

distance
gravity
graphwidth
graphheight
fontsize (in percent)

The graph-name is the name of the generated files.

default => the default-configuration for all graphs
graphOnlyCDIJPA
graphAllClasses
graphEventObserverClasses
graphEJBClasses
graphInstanceClasses
graphInjectClasses
graphProducesClasses
graphInstanceProducesClasses
graphConnectedInjectProducesClasses
graphConnectedInjectInstanceProducesClasses
graphConnectedInstanceProducesClasses
graphResourcesClasses
graphJPAClasses

Example plugin-definition/configuration:

      <plugin>
        <groupId>de.struller-baumann</groupId>
        <artifactId>visualee</artifactId>
        <version>0.27-SNAPSHOT</version>
        <configuration>
           <outputdirectory>visualee</outputdirectory>
           <graphs>
              <graph>
                 <name>default</name>
                 <distance>180</distance>
                 <gravity>20</gravity>
                 <graphwidth>800</graphwidth>
                 <graphheight>500</graphheight>
                 <fontsize>90</fontsize>
              </graph>
              <graph>
                 <name>graphInjectClasses</name>
                 <distance>200</distance>
                 <gravity>20</gravity>
                 <graphwidth>1200</graphwidth>
                 <fontsize>110</fontsize>
              </graph>
              <graph>
                 <name>graphEJBClasses</name>
                 <distance>300</distance>
                 <gravity>30</gravity>
              </graph>
           </graphs>
        </configuration>
        <executions>
           <execution>
              <phase>process-resources</phase>
              <goals>
                 <goal>visualize</goal>
              </goals>
           </execution>
        </executions>
     </plugin>

Configure encoding (since 0.27-SNAPSHOT available)

     ...
     <configuration>
          ...
          <encoding>UTF-16</encoding> <!-- optional, default encoding is UTF-8 -->
          ...
     </configuration>
     ...

Filter sources (since 0.27-SNAPSHOT available)

It' possible to filter classes by classname, packagename or sourcecode. The filterToken is not casesensitive. Example: You don't want to have the testclasses of your project in the graph.

     ...
     <configuration>
          ...
          <filters>
                  <!-- Example class filter, filters by classname -->
                  <filter>
                     <type>class</type>
                     <filterToken>Logger</filterToken>
                     <exclude>false</exclude>   <!-- exclude is optional, default is true -->
                  </filter>

                  <!-- Example package filter, filters by packagename -->
                  <filter>
                     <type>package</type>
                     <filterToken>test</filterToken>
                  </filter>

                  <!-- Example source filter, filters by sourcecode -->
                  <filter>
                     <type>source</type>
                     <filterToken>return null;</filterToken>
                  </filter>

          </filters>
          ...
     </configuration>
     ...