Expand the possibilities – by connecting Astah and PlantUML

As many of you know, PlantUML is one of the most popular open source tools which enables you to define UML diagrams in a simple text format. It’s intuitive, easy and fast. It even automatically lays out the model elements by itself, so diagram is all ready to go without worrying about tweaking the layout and you can stay focused on the content.

There are many text editors, Wikis and IDEs that integrate with PlantUML to provide rich support for software engineers all around the world. As we, UML tool vendor developing Astah over a decade, have been always seeking a way to make software engineers happy and finally we’re happy to introduce this new plugin to connect Astah with PlantUML today.

What Astah PlantUML Plugin does

You can export PlantUML diagrams to Astah and vice versa. But this is not about just converting diagrams between two UML tools. This is about expanding the possibilities for what you can do with your UML diagrams for explaining the design with others, committing to repo, for versioning…etc. Because you can take advantages of both tools’ unique and powerful strengths to get your job don faster and easier.
If you are already using both PlantUML and Astah, go ahead and download. 🙂 If you never have an experience with Astah, you can get a free trial from here. (Choose Astah Professional!)

Download Astah PlantUML Plugin

First step – insert PlantUML in Astah

By installing the plugin (read instruction), you can add a PlantUML editor in Astah.

Export PlantUML diagram to Astah

Enter text in the PlantUML editor, then hit [▲toAstah] button. It creates a model element in the diagram and also models in Astah.

Export Astah diagram to PlantUML

Hitting [▼toPlant] button generates PlantUML text with a preview based on the currently-opened Astah diagram.

Currently, Class diagrams, Sequence diagrams, Activity diagrams and Statemachine diagrams are supported.
Please refer to the Readme file fore more details.

Suggested UseCases:

Create UML models from Excel faster

Through this plug-in, you can directly copy text from the spec documentation, paste and format it in PlantUML editor, then generate models easy and fast.

Astah already has a way to create Classes by copying and pasting texts without this plug-in.

But this only creates Classes, no Attributes and Operations and this plug-in enables you to create Classes with Attributes and Operations which means that you can create more detailed and complete models in less time.

For Protocol buffer templates

Converted text from model object could be used as a template for Protocol buffer.

There are some model-to-text converter plug-ins available already but all requires detailed configurations to perform. So this PlantUML plug-in makes it much easier and smoother to process with converted texts in less hassle.

Maintain traceability between Class diagrams and Sequence diagrams

Astah creates models when importing PlantUML diagram to Astah. The models can be used in any other diagrams in a project. So after you import a Class diagram to Astah, you can drag the Class model to Sequence diagram to create a lifeline with it. The messages between lifelines can be created by choosing the Operations of the base classes. And changes made in one diagram will sync to the other dynamically. So when any change happens in one diagram, you won’t have to go through all the related diagrams to update them.