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X002548
Not Just a Number
15586 Posts |
 Posted - 2003-05-20 : 16:20:50
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Hey all,Arnold blew my mind with this from a different thread:quote:
I got fed up drawing little boxes and arrows on the backs of envelopes trying to follow the queries in the last Access database I had dealings with: sat down and wrote something that (kind-of) works out what queries & tables get referenced by other queries, splats it into a GraphViz file and gets dot to draw the damned thing instead.
It appears to be a tool to graphically document code, but I have know idea how to get started and try ot out.Arnold posted the link to:http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/download.htmlBut it's all greek to me.Anyone have any experience with this?Brett8-) |
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Arnold Fribble
Yak-finder General
1961 Posts |
Posted - 2003-05-20 : 17:22:09
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It's a tool (or suite of tools) for automatically laying out graphs. Dot takes a text file in GraphViz format containing the nodes and edges of an acyclic graph and outputs the laid-out graph in some raster or vector graphics format -- gif, SVG, pdf, that sort of thing. Dotty is an interactive program that does the same, and allows you to (with a nasty, hamfisted interface that betrays its X Windows origins) manipulate the graph further -- delete chunks of it, add extra nodes. There are some other programs in the suite more suited to laying out graphs with cycles, but I didn't find them so useful.There are a number of other tools out there for doing similar sorts of thing, this one just seemed simplest to me at the time (and it's free!)BTW, the word "splat" was used somewhat whimsically -- it's the sound of a graph structure hitting a flat file  |
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GraphViz, Dots and Splats! (Huh?)