jSonde – Generate a UML Sequence Diagram

The eclipse TPTP profiler has a very cool feature, create a UML sequence diagram from a profiling session. But the problem the TPTP profiling agent doesn’t run on my MacBook. So I looked for other free tools and I found jSonde an open source Java profiler (GPL).

jSonde can be used to generate a UML sequence diagram from a java application by profiling the app e.g. this can be used to document the actual implementation of a use case. How a this can be done, I will show step by step here in this post:

Step 1.) Get jSonde from http://www.jsonde.com/

Step 2.) Create a JUnit test case for the use case / function which you want to document, or when you do TDD look for an existing test...

Here the example code of my test:

@Test
 public void testPurchase() {

  Seller sellerOne = kasse.getSeller(100);
  Seller sellerTwo = kasse.getSeller(101);

  Position hose = new Position();
  hose.setDescription("Hose");
  hose.setPrice(2150);
  hose.setSeller(sellerOne);

  Position kleid = new Position();
  kleid.setDescription("Kleid");
  kleid.setPrice(2150);
  kleid.setSeller(sellerTwo);

  Sale sale = new Sale();
  sale.addPosition(hose);
  sale.addPosition(kleid);

  kasse.purchase(sale);  

}

Step 3.) Run the test e.g. in eclipse (or in other IDE) with the follow VM parameter: “-javaagent${JSONE_PATH}/lib/jsonde.agent-1.0.0.beta7.jar=60001”

Step 4.) Start jSonde and click File -> New Project

Step 5.) Enter a project name and the namespace of the application then click Connect

Step 6.) After the test is pass, click sequence diagram and select the test method in the tree view

Here the full UML sequence diagram for the "Purchase" test implementation:

Links:

• http://www.jsonde.com/
• http://www.eclipse.org/tptp/