Question: Solution for sharing models automatically to a static HTML web page

Plug-in & Open API
1

Hi Visual Paradigm Community,

I’m reaching out from an organization where we’re looking for an efficient way to export models created by various team members. Our goal is to consolidate these models into a static HTML web page for easy sharing and reference. Ideally, we’d like to automate this export/sharing process entirely, eliminating the need to manually open Visual Paradigm for each model.

We’re comfortable in trying to develop our custom solutions, including Java plugins, and leveraging Python scripts and Azure for automation. Our primary goal is to streamline our workflow through automation.

At this point, we would appreciate any insights or recommendations regarding processes or methods to achieve this.

Thank you in advance for your assistance!

Best
Jesper

2

Actually the Project Publisher feature in v17.1 already support output project into HTML pages. The Project Publisher do have command line interface which allows you to create script for publish projects without manually go through the GUI. If the project is manged by our repository (either using VP Online cloud service, or on-premises Teamwork Server) then you can even use it to host the published content and provide access control to them. Otherwise you can create scripts to copy the published content to your own hosting location.

3

Hi,

This is exactly what we have done in our organisation and we’ve been using this mechanism for well over 8 years or so. The reason for us going down this route vs. Project Publisher that Rain mentioned is that it gives us flexibility of styling/layout and navigation.

There’s a few things which we have done to help aid this process and to automate it as much as possible, these include:

  • built various plugins to help our team automatically create model structures in VP or to automate certain diagram creation processes.
  • built a node script which executes these plugins everyday (using CI/CD) to export diagrams and to extract the meta data relating to these diagrams (model elements, descriptions etc) into a database in the cloud.
  • built a website / express server to serve up content, allowing users to see content from VP.

Here’s some resources which may help you along with your journey:

Running Plug-in without starting Visual Paradigm

VP Java Plugin Docs (look for ExportDiagramAsImageOption class to export images)

Hope this helps!

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