How to use doxygen to create UML class diagrams from C source

Question

I have been searching for some material that describes how to generate simple class diagrams with doxygen  but couldn t find one  Can anybody help   I need to create diagrams as shown below from a set of C   files    If there are better tools to achieve this easier  please let me know

User · Answer

Hmm  this seems to be a bit of an old question  but since I ve been messing about with Doxygen configuration last few days  while my head s still full of current info let s have a stab at it -  I think the previous answers almost have it   The missing option is to add COLLABORATION GRAPH   YES in the Doxyfile  I assume you can do the equivalent thing somewhere in the doxywizard GUI  I don t use doxywizard    So  as a more complete example  typical  Doxyfile  options related to UML output that I tend to use are   EXTRACT ALL            YES CLASS DIAGRAMS        YES HIDE UNDOC RELATIONS   NO HAVE DOT               YES CLASS GRAPH            YES COLLABORATION GRAPH    YES UML LOOK               YES UML LIMIT NUM FIELDS   50 TEMPLATE RELATIONS     YES DOT GRAPH MAX NODES    100 MAX DOT GRAPH DEPTH    0 DOT TRANSPARENT        YES   These settings will generate both  inheritance   CLASS GRAPH YES  and  collaboration   COLLABORATION GRAPH YES  diagrams   Depending on your target for  deployment  of the doxygen output  setting DOT IMAGE FORMAT   svg may also be of use  With svg output the diagrams are  scalable  instead of the fixed resolution of bitmap formats such as  png  Apparently  if viewing the output in browsers other than IE  there is also INTERACTIVE SVG   YES which will allow  interactive zooming and panning  of the generated svg diagrams  I did try this some time ago  and the svg output was very visually attractive  but at the time  browser support for svg was still a bit inconsistent  so hopefully that situation may have improved lately   As other comments have mentioned  some of these settings  DOT GRAPH MAX NODES in particular  do have potential performance impacts  so YMMV   I tend to hate  RTFM  style answers  so apologies for this sentence  but in this case the Doxygen documentation really is your friend  so check out the Doxygen docs on the above mentioned settings- last time I looked you can find the details at http   www doxygen nl manual config html

User · Answer

Enterprise Architect will build a UML diagram from imported source code

User · Answer

Doxygen creates inheritance diagrams but I dont think it will create an entire class hierachy  It does allow you to use the GraphViz tool  If you use the Doxygen GUI frontend tool you will find the relevant options in Step2  - gt  Wizard tab - gt  Diagrams  The DOT relation options are under the Expert Tab

User · Answer

Quote from this post  it s written by the author of doxygen himself     run doxygen -g and change the following options of the generated Doxyfile       EXTRACT ALL              YES     HAVE DOT                 YES     UML LOOK                 YES  run doxygen again

User · Answer

The 2 highest upvoted answers are correct  As of today  the only thing I needed to change  from default settings  was to enable generation using dot instead of the built-in generator   Some important notes    Doxygen will not generate an actual full diagram of all classes in the project  It will generate a separate image for each hierarchy  If you have multiple  unrelated class hierarchies you will get multiple images  All these diagrams can be found in html inherits html or  from the website navigation  classes    class hierarchy     Go to the textual class hierarchy   This is a C   question  so let s talk about templates  Especially if you inherit from T    Each template instantiation will be correctly considered a different type by Doxygen  Types which inherit from different instantations will have different parent classes on the diagram  If a class template foo inherits from T and the T template type parameter has a default  such default will be assumed  If there is a type bar which inherits from foo lt U gt  where U is different than the default  bar will have a foo lt U gt  parent  foo lt  gt  and bar lt U gt  will not have a common parent  If there are multiple class templates which inherit from at least one of their template parameters  Doxygen will assume a common parent for these class templates as long as the template type parameters have exactly the same names in the code  This incentivizes for consistency in naming  CRTP and reverse CRTP just work  Recursive template inheritance trees are not expanded  Any variant instantiation will be displayed to inherit from variant lt Ts    gt   Class templates with no instantiations are being drawn  They will have a  lt     gt  string in their name representing type and non-type parameters which did not have defaults  Class template full and partial specializations are also being drawn  Doxygen generates correct graphs if specializations inherit from different types

User · Answer

I think you will need to edit the doxys file and set GENERATE UML  something like that  to true  And you need to have dot graphviz installed

[c++] How to use doxygen to create UML class diagrams from C++ source

Examples related to c++

Examples related to uml

Examples related to doxygen

Examples related to graphviz

Examples related to class-diagram