This tutorial fits into the row of our tutorials teaching the basics of Eclipse and Eclipse modeling technologies. It is intended to be performed by bachelor or master students taking part on practicals (e.g. Eclipse Practical (winter term 201213)) or warming up for a thesis.

The aim of this tutorial is to make you familiar with KLighD and the KLighD way of creating diagrams of models and even any data structures being worth to be visualized by node-link-diagrams.

Preliminaries

1. Read about the ideas & motivation of KLighD in our paper "Just Model! – Putting Automatic Synthesis of Node-Link-Diagrams into Practice", cited at Lightweight Diagrams (KLighD)
   • You can skip the size estimation parts and focus on section I, III, and V.
2. Install the KLighD from our latest release update site as demonstrated on Lightweight Diagrams (KLighD) and import the examples project.
3. Make yourself familiar with the UML2UseCaseDiagramSynthesis contained that project

   • Have also a look at the ...Extensions classes mentioned in UML2UseCaseDiagramSynthesis, especially KNodeExtensions.
     What is the purpose of createNode(...) and getNode(...)?

Implement a simple turing diagram synthesis

1. Create a new diagram synthesis implementation by means of the KLighD project wizard as illustrated on Lightweight Diagrams (KLighD).
2. Add a dependency of the newly introduced plug-in project to the project defining your turing modeling language.
3. Let your diagram synthesis create a node for each state declared in your state machine.
   • Let those node be depicted by ellipses or rounded rectangles containing a text field showing the corresponding state's name
4. Let your diagram synthesis create an edge for each transition being depicted by a polyline
   • Attach arrow decorators to those polylines.

Augment your diagram synthesis

1. The actor nodes in UML2UseCaseDiagramSynthesis are equipped with (node) labels. This is done by means of a convenience method provided KLabelExtensions.
   • Equip the edges of your turing diagrams with labels exhibiting the guard, new symbol, etc; use a fitting method for edge labels from KLabelExtensions.
2. Improve the layout of your diagrams
   1. switch the layout algorithm to Graphviz dot by setting the property LayoutOptions.ALGORITHM on the root node to de.cau.cs.kieler.graphviz.dot.
   2. change the edge figures from polylines to splines.