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Class Diagram View Proposal

From MonoDevelop

Table of contents
1 Overview
2 Features

2.1 Exploring
2.2 Editing

3 Implementation

3.1 Tasks
3.2 Justification for using Moonlight
3.3 Shared Designer Canvas

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Overview

It would be useful to has a visual tool for browsing and editing the class hierarchy, like the class diagram tool in Visual Studio or UML editors.

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Features

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Exploring

The canvas would allow exploring the types available in MonoDevelop's internal Code DOM. This means it will work for source code and assemblies.

  • The canvas would show types (classes/interfaces/enums/structs) as items with lists of members and the base classes/interfaces.
  • The different kinds of members within each type should be grouped into collapsible sections.
  • Items' members and base class/interfaces should be expandable with a click. This would add the corresponding type's item to the diagram, linked by an arrow (or a double-arrow for IEnumerable collections).
  • It should be possible to rearrange items on the canvas by dragging the headers.
  • Double-clicking on an item should jump to the source code.
  • The diagram should be serialised to/from a file, preferably the XML .cd file format the Visual Studio uses.
  • Printing and exporting PNG files would be useful.
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Editing

  • When the language binding for a project supports refactoring features, the class diagram should expose some of those features from the GUI, e.g. renaming, adding/removing members, creating classes, etc.
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Implementation

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Tasks

  • Basic addin infrastructure
    • Extend /MonoDevelop/Ide/DisplayBindings with a view that can handle .cd files.
    • Registering the mimetype with MonoDevelop.
    • Add a template for a new .cd file.
    • Add a command to the code context menu to launch the diagram view from an existing class.
  • Implement the canvas using moonlight
    • dragging objects
    • links/arrows and routing
    • autolayout
  • Interface it to the code completion database for type information.
  • Implement a property provider for editing types using MD's Refactorer engine.
  • Add a pad for editing types' members using the Refactorer.
  • Implement a toolbox provider so that new types can be dragged from the toolbox.
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Justification for using Moonlight

  • A stable canvas
  • Has a good Mono binding
  • Can load shapes and animations from XAML -- makes theming and graphical prettiness much easier
  • Good demo of Moonlight in an app; dogfooding Moonlight
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Shared Designer Canvas

It would be useful if the designer canvas were a re-usable component, so that it could be used for visualising things like database tables and relationship. As long as the canvas is well-separated from the form of the actual data it's visualising, this should not be hard.

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