There are lots of visibility options you can explore. Otherwise when you start to drag a class that class will become visible in the editor if it happens to be open. Tip: in the project explorer or navigator view keep the “sync with editor option” unselected. Associations will automatically displayed between classes that have them. Once done, you can drag any class visible in Eclipse to the diagram. That’s not likely to be a very useful or interesting diagram.Ĭreating a class diagram is a simple matter of creating a new file in Eclipse. If one keeps a class diagram within a package in the source tree that would indicate to the poor sap maintaining your code that the diagram contains only classes from the package it’s saved in. I generally use one of the latter two approaches. They can sit right alongside the code in your source tree, in a seperate folder in your project or in a separate project on it’s own. Class DiagramsĬlass diagrams are saved as files within any of your Eclipse projects. Installation is easy, so we’ll skip that and dive right in. Register on their site to get a free trial. This is the best bang for your UML buck I’ve found. The class diagramming tool is free, the sequence diagramming tool is an inexpensive $19 at the time of this writing. Both can reverse engineer from your code. Object Aid provides two plug-ins for Eclipse: a class diagramming tool and a sequence diagramming tool. One easy way to do so is with a sequence diagraming tool that can generate a sequence diagram for you. When diving into a new codebase it’s often very handy to be able to get a big picture view quickly. What are the architectural layers? How is the code structured? What are the main components of the application? One would think this would be obvious across similar domains, but it’s suprisingly not. I tend to be a big picture person and need to understand the lay of the land before I can dive into the details. I think this also applies to how we look at code. “Everyone has different learning styles” says my wife the teacher.

Sequence diagram tool eclipse