Question

I have searched and am looking for a tool which would help when working with XML files.
I’ve got to understand different XML structures and it gets quite annoying when I have to draw everything on a paper or model a diagram myself.

I would like to know if anybody has some tool to offer which would help when figuring out XML structures ?

For anyone who doesn’t understand why I need this, imagine this:

<parent id="1"> 
 <name> ... </name>
</parent>
<parent id="2">
 <name> ... </name>
</parent>

<child mother="1" father="2"></child>

In this case, mother and father are set by id in parent element.

And sometimes I have a huge structure which is connected with other nodes in this way(using ID or some string identificator). It sucks to handle this manually and I would like to know if there’s some automatic way to draw a diagram from XML(with minimal input).

Thank you

Answer 1

I know you’re asking for a tool, and you’re tagging your question with UML, but perhaps you’ll like the Graph::Easy module with Perl, just to get a first big view of your XML.

Here is the sample XML :

<test>
  <parent id="1"/>
  <parent id="2"/>
  <child id="11" mother="1" father="2"/>
  <child id="10" mother="1" father="2"/>
</test>

Here is the little script :

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;

use Graph::Easy;
use IO::All;
use Path::Class;
use XML::LibXML;

my $graph   = Graph::Easy->new(timeout => 100);
my $parser  = XML::LibXML->new();
my $xmlFile = file('...') # Replace by your path.

my $dom = $parser->parse_file($xmlFile);
foreach my $childNode ($dom->findnodes('//child'))
{
    $graph->add_edge
    (
        $childNode->getAttribute('id'),
        $childNode->getAttribute('mother'),
        'has mother'
    );
    $graph->add_edge
    (
        $childNode->getAttribute('id'),
        $childNode->getAttribute('father'),
        'has father'
    );
}

$graph->as_svg > io("graph.svg");

and the result :

That’s just a very simple example, but you can easily go further and add different types of lines, colors, etc. By example :