Graphviz Tutorial

Introduction

All Apache Thrift tutorials require that you have:

1. The Apache Thrift Compiler and Libraries, see Download and Building from Source for more details.
2. Generated the tutorial.thrift and shared.thrift files:
   

   thrift -r --gen cpp tutorial.thrift

3. Followed all prerequisites listed below.

Prerequisites

• A Graphviz renderer

The official renderers can be used as a command line tool to produce a graphic from the ‘.gv’ file

Overview

The Graphviz generator is a convenient way to generate documentation diagrams for your API. Usage:

thrift -r --gen gv tutorial.thrift

This will create the file gen-gv/tutorial.gv, which is a Graphviz source - a plain-text description language used for graphs (in this case, for IDL’s types and functions diagram). You will need to actually render those graphs into any of the supported output formats (e.g. PNG, PDFs, SVG, etc.) by using a Graphiz renderer in your platform.

dot -Tpdf -otutorial.pdf gen-gv/tutorial.gv

Extra options

By default, the diagrams are not rendered with arrows from functions to exceptions (although the exception structures are displayed). You can set the generator to render those exceptions arrows (i.e. function throws) by using the “exception” option:

thrift -r --gen:gv:exceptions gv tutorial.thrift