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Mscgen

Mscgen is a small program that parses Message Sequence Chart descriptions and produces PNG, SVG, EPS or server side image maps (ismaps) as the output. Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are a way of representing entities and interactions over some time period and are often used in combination with SDL. MSCs are popular in Telecoms to specify how protocols operate although MSCs need not be complicated to create or use. Mscgen aims to provide a simple text language that is clear to create, edit and understand, which can also be transformed into common image formats for display or printing.

This program and the language it parses have been inspired by Graphviz Dot, which provides a really good way to document State Transition Diagrams, data structures and directed graphs. Unlike Graphviz, this program does no clever layout operations or spline routing as this is not needed for MSCs, and so was much simpler to implement. Doxygen (version 1.5.2 onwards) also allows MSCs to be embedded directly in the same way that dot diagrams can be added to documentation, making it easy to improve Doxygen generated documentation through the use of message sequence charts.

Example 

# MSC for some fictional process
msc {
  hscale = "2";

  a,b,c;

  a->b [ label = "ab()" ] ;
  b->c [ label = "bc(TRUE)"];
  c=>c [ label = "process(1)" ];
  c=>c [ label = "process(2)" ];
  ...;
  c=>c [ label = "process(n)" ];
  c=>c [ label = "process(END)" ];
  a<<=c [ label = "callback()"];
  ---  [ label = "If more to run", ID="*" ];
  a->a [ label = "next()"];
  a->c [ label = "ac1()\nac2()"];
  b<-c [ label = "cb(TRUE)"];
  b->b [ label = "stalled(...)"];
  a<-b [ label = "ab() = FALSE"];
}

위 내용을 example.msc 파일로 저장한 후 아래의 명령을 사용하면 된다. 

$ mscgen -T png -i example.msc

Doxygen integration

Doxygen 1.5.2 버전 부터 사용 가능하며, 1.8.16 버전 부터 프로그램에 완전 포함되었다. (Embedding)

See also

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