Generating UML documentation

The Generate Documentation command generates detailed documentation about your UML project in HTML, MS Word, RTF or PDF. The documentation generated by this command can be freely altered and used; permission from Altova to do so is not required.

Documentation is generated for the modeling elements you select in the Generate Documentation dialog box. You can either use the fixed design, or use a StyleVision SPS for the design. Using a StyleVision SPS enables you to customize the output of the generated documentation. How to do this is explained in the section, User-Defined Stylesheets.

Note:

To use an SPS to generate documentation, you must have StyleVision installed on your machine. Related elements are typically hyperlinked in the onscreen output, enabling you to navigate from component to component.

To generate documentation in MS Word format, you must have MS Word (version 2000 or later) installed.

This opens the "Generate documentation" dialog box. The screenshot below shows the default dialog box settings.

Note that you can also create partial documentation of modeling elements by right clicking an element (or multiple elements using CTRL + click) in the Model Tree and selecting "Generate Documentation". The element can be a folder, class, interface etc. The documentation options are the same in both cases.

Related elements are hyperlinked in the onscreen output, enabling you to navigate from component to component. All manually created hyperlinks also appear in the documentation.

documentation is also generated for included C#, Java and/or VB subprojects (profiles) if enabled in the Include tab!

•	Select "Use fixed design..." to use the built-in documentation template.

•	Select "Use user-defined..." to use a predefined StyleVision Power Stylesheet created in StyleVision. The SPS files are available in the ...\My Documents\Altova\UModel2013\Documentation\UModel\ folder.

•	Click Edit to launch StyleVision and open the selected SPS in a StyleVision window.

•	The output format is specified here: either HTML, Microsoft Word, RTF, or PDF.

Microsoft Word documents are created with the .doc file extension when generated using a fixed design, and with a .docx file extension when generated using a StyleVision SPS.

The PDF output format is only available if you use a StyleVision SPS to generate the documentation.

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"Split output to multiple files" generates an output file for each modeling element that would appear in the TOC overview when generating a single output file e.g. a class C1 with a nested class CNest exists; C1.html contains all info pertaining to C1 and CNest as well as all their attributes, properties etc

•	The Embed CSS in HTML option allows you to embed an existing (referenced) CSS file in the HTML documentation, when active; or keep the reference to the CSS file, and the file itself, external when inactive.

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The Embed diagrams option is enabled for the Microsoft Word and RTF output options. When this option is selected, diagrams are embedded in the generated file. Diagrams are created as PNG files (for HTML), or PNG/EMF files (for MS Word and RTF), which are displayed in the result file via object links.

•	Create folder for diagrams generates a subfolder, below the selected output folder, that will contain all diagrams when the documentation is output.

•	The "Show Result File..." option is enabled for all output options. When checked, the result files are displayed in Browser View (HTML output), MS Word (MS Word output), and the default application for .rtf files (RTF output).

•	Generate links to local files option allows you to specify if the generated links are to be absolute, or relative, to the output file.

allows you to select which diagrams and modeling elements are to appear in the documentation.

Note that documenting subprojects can be disabled by deselecting the "Included subprojects" check box.

allows you to select the element details that are to appear in the documentation.

•	If you intend to import XML tags text in your documentation, please de-activate the "as HTML" option under the Documentation option.

•	The up / down fields allow you to define the nesting depth shown above/below the current class in the hierarchy diagram.

•	The "expand each element only once" option, only allows one of the same classifiers to be expanded in the same image/diagram.

allows you to customize the font settings for the various headers and text content.

The following screenshots show the fixed-design documentation for the Bank_MultiLanguage.ump file that is included in the ...\UModelExamples directory.

The screenshot above shows the generated documentation with the diagram and element index links at the top of the HTML file.

The screenshot below shows the specifics of the Account class and its relation to other classes.

Note that the individual attributes and properties in the class diagrams are also hyperlinked to their definitions. Clicking a property takes you to its definition. The individual hierarchy classes, as well as all underlined text, are hyperlinked.