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Show HN: TSDiagram – Diagrams as Code with TypeScript

130 points

1 year ago

| 15 comments

Made an online tool for creating diagrams with TypeScript. I quite like it for thinking about how to shape my data, even if I end up using a different language in the end.

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girvo

1 year ago

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The web page doesn't work in Firefox :( Looks neat though, I checked it out on my phone. Right up my alley!

The error it throws is:

    TypeError: WeakMap key must be an object, got Be

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_andrei_

1 year ago

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Yes, sorry, I made a terrible mistake in not testing my state management monstrosity lib in Firefox... Should be working now!

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whilenot-dev

1 year ago

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Works for me on Firefox/Linux, thanks!

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danmur

1 year ago

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Thank you :)

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graup

1 year ago

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Pretty neat! I appreciate the time that went into making the graph render nicely.

I was recently having fun with Reactflow myself. It took a bit of time to figure out custom nodes and edges. I found that ELK 'layered' (with some tweaking of settings) produces very nice layouts, but of course, we can't use its edge routing in real time if we want to allow users to move nodes around. Thanks for pointing me to @tisoap/react-flow-smart-edge ! I also came up with a similar `wasManuallyMoved` logic. https://github.com/3rd/tsdiagram/blob/66b186e85bf176e47128d0...

Reactflow's docs have a decent example for using ELK but I wish it went into a bit more detail regarding these choices.

For tweaking ELK settings, this online editor is also super valuable: https://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/elklive/elkgraph.html?c...

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_andrei_

1 year ago

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Glad we share the same pain! I'm not happy with the edge routing, it's ok in most cases, but it could be so much better. It's definitely where most of the upcoming development time will go. I'll bite the bullet and make something custom with what I can learn from react-fow-smart-edge and https://medium.com/swlh/routing-orthogonal-diagram-connector..., I really really want the edges not to overlap, but be a bit spaced out, so it's clear where each one goes.

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fron

1 year ago

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That's super cool! Is there a way to save the editor and diagram state into a URL hash so we can share tsdiagram links with others, similar to how the TypeScript Playground works?

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_andrei_

1 year ago

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Added now, thanks for the idea!

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yasuocidal

1 year ago

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Wonderful tool! Reminds me of dbdiagram[1] we use at a project of mine, but that one is kinda slow and sometimes messes up the organization just because it felt like it.

Do you have plans on having something like export to SQL or import from SQL?

[1]https://dbdiagram.io/

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_andrei_

1 year ago

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Shouldn't be hard to do both things, will def. add that. Part of the plan is to switch to Tree-sitter and use other languages as well.

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karmakaze

1 year ago

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Yes I like dbdiagram.io and it's great that we can get something that's more flexible that works the same way.

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_andrei_

1 year ago

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Firefox update: fixed the issue, guess that's what you get if you roll your own store.

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hbcondo714

1 year ago

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Thanks for sharing! I generated a png and added it to my repo's wiki with an acknowledgment to your repo:

https://github.com/hbcondo/revenut-app/wiki#data-models

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_andrei_

1 year ago

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Happy you like it, no need for any kind of attribution! Will add proper SVG export soon (without foreignObject), it will be much better after that.

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starf1sh

1 year ago

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One of those "wonder why nobody's thought about this" tools. Awesome idea!

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tanepiper

1 year ago

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This is actually really nice! We deal with a lot of types - from our headless CMS, GraphQL, Knowledge Graph, etc - so having a visual tool for them help - typescript was the one area missing for it.

Now if it can be exported as RDF or Cypher...

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yodon

1 year ago

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Having just done a bunch of Mermaid diagrams this looks very cool. I particularly like having the freedom to drag nodes around in yours to improve the layout.

Is there a way to turn off the dot grid?

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_andrei_

1 year ago

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Will add a background switcher!

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raselhanout

1 year ago

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This is wonderful! We also use typescript to define our data/database structure for our non-ts projects and this could be a very handy tool. I will definitely use it whenever I get a chance to.

One thing that could be improved are the overlapping lines. In the example, the Node->Node and Node->Task lines are undistinguishable.

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throwitaway222

1 year ago

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Completely blank in firefox

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throwitaway222

1 year ago

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it is working now

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