How to create data flow diagram for Java source code

java jakarta-ee dataflow-diagram
Altavista picture Altavista · Oct 5, 2012 · Viewed 7.8k times · Source

I have written an application with approximately 500 classes in java , Now I know this has been asked plenty of times here, but I still couldn't find a proper resource or tutorial for creating a data flow diagram for my entire project.

Any help/tutorial/resource or code sample would be appreciated.

Answer

SpaceTrucker picture SpaceTrucker · Oct 5, 2012

You might be able to derive data flows from your unit tests. If you have a instance A and a mock B and you expect instance C to be passed in as a prameter to B.bar(Object) when you call A.foo(C). In such cases you get data flow from one object to another.

The second thing to do is to inspect you application configuration. If you find that instance D is configured with instance E, which itself is configured with instance F you can chain together the data flows, that you have derived from your unit tests.

But i don't know of any implementation for this. But both parts seem to be relatively easy to implement. In the first part you need to hook on to your mocking framework. The second part is easy if you are using dependency injection.

EDIT:
If you got all that data together, you can for example use the Eclipse UML API to create the diagrams.

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