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May 30, 2024
Seeking Feedback

Implement proper integration with PlantUML Markup language

Related products:Lucidchart
  • May 30, 2024
  • 38 replies
  • 4383 views

One of the selling points of lucidchart for my organisation was the fact that one could use PlantUML Markup language we define diagrams which would allow use to keep all diagrams within lucidchart. The documentation mentions that and also talks about some of the options that can be used. However, after effectively trying to import a simple PlantUML into your tool, the result was not the expected.

Not only it doesn’t support the standards and some basic features, it also doesn’t support some of the features that you say that supports (i.e. “actor” entity) and even after trying to cleanup everything that is not supported, the diagram is simply unreadable.

UML is used for technical diagrams nad people that make them know what they are doing. Instead of trying to implement something from scratch 8which is what you were trying to do), you could simply implement/integrate fully with PlantUML, which is a known, stable and robust markup language to design and render diagrams.

PlanUML has free integration and the integration documentation is clear and simple to follow. You don’t need to make it “fancy” or allow to style component individually since that is not what tech people are looking for and PlantUML already supports it out of the box with several teams and styling.

The integration can be really simple to the point you just render the diagram itself or add a container into the page where the diagram is rendered. plantULM generates SVG diagrams which works well with the system you already have anyway.

Without this feature it will be very difficult to sell the usage of this tool for tech work since we will still need to use a different tool to manage PlantUML diagrams vs normal/standard diagrams, which seems to beat the purpose of your tool.

Hope this is really considered since it will be an HUGE selling point for tech teams.

Here some resources to make your life easier:


Happy to discuss this with someone on Lucidchart side.
 

Many thanks.

Pinned Reply By kellsworth

Thanks to everyone for the thoughts in this thread. I’m on the Product team here at Lucid and will be starting up some research soon around how people like to work with markup languages such as Plant UML and Mermaid and what an ideal experience would look like. If would be interested in a conversation, please respond in this thread, and I'll reach out with more information!

Comments

Lucid product team
May 30, 2024

@miguel.pinto — thank you so much for taking the time to reach out to us, and for providing this incredibly thoughtful level of detail. I’m a PM at Lucidchart and would appreciate the chance to speak with you further on this — I’ll reach out via email!

August 1, 2024

@Chloe  do you have any updates for the community. I’m a VP of Engineering and have rolled out Lucid for all of our Engineering documentation needs. UML features in Lucid need to fully support PlantUML and possibly Mermaid. Our engineers are preferring these code first tools for UML and now I have leakage of Engineering documentation be fragmented across tools which was what we wanted to avoid by rolling out Lucid!

Lucid product team
August 1, 2024

Hi Kyle! Thanks for your message. We don’t have active work to enhance our PlantUML features, but we do have Mermaid support coming soon! We’ll be sure to update this thread when it’s released.

Aimee G
Lucidite
September 6, 2024

Hi @Kyle Z. wanted to circle back here and let you know - Mermaid is now a capability!  Full details here: https://help.lucid.co/hc/en-us/articles/29549366940948-Diagram-as-code-with-Mermaid-in-Lucidchart

October 24, 2024

@Chloe @Aimee G 

it’s nice that Mermaid integration is not available. However, unfortunately Mermaide doesn’t have the same level of control or functionality has PlantUML (which is a lot more mature and used across the board by engineering teams).

As discussed with you before, integration with PlantUML can be vey simple from your side side all the “magic” happens on the PlantUMS server and you just need to add the SVG generated to the canvas and keep a copy of the text attached so that the user can edit it and update the diagram.

It would be a HUGE improvement to your functionalities and one that will be very very very appreciated by all tech teams (these are mainly tech tools and not something that basic users will be using),

Please have a serious consideration over this.

Kelsey Gaag
Lucidite
October 28, 2024

Hi @miguel.pinto

Thank you for the additional feedback!

November 18, 2024

Hi All
 

Plantuml comes along as a standalone jar file https://plantuml.com/download

Should not be too hard to integrate that

Ambar D
Lucid community team
November 19, 2024

Hi ​@beatt, thank you for your contribution to this idea! We encourage anyone else who’s interested in this to upvote this post and share any additional details about your use case or what you’d like to see in this experience. For more information about how we manage feedback in this community, please take a look at this post.

November 26, 2024

Lack of basic support like the ‘participant’ command make building good looking sequence diagrams very difficult. Please add full support for plantUML.

Ambar D
Lucid community team
November 27, 2024

Hi ​@gffletchatc1, thank you for upvoting this idea and taking the time to share your feedback! This is the perfect place to do so.