Displaying metadata on model elements

[jaxley]

Question

I've been playing with Structurizr and did not see a way to surface metadata about the objects in the views. e.g. imagine wanting to generate a deployment model from a cloudformation stack or similar - you'd want to include information like subnets, VPC ids, IP addresses, etc. to differentiate between nodes and maybe even pull tag information. The properties bucket looks like the way to add arbitrary data to the model, but I don't see any way to render any of that data on the diagrams. That may be due to the properties being used as structurizr internal config directives in the examples I've seen.

Is this something on the roadmap?

draw.io supports adding metadata and displaying it on c4 diagrams: https://www.drawio.com/blog/c4-modelling

I'm also thinking it would be powerful to be able to use the metadata in c4 diagrams like you would with archimate Label Expressions https://declanbright.com/archimate-archi-tips-and-tricks.php#label-expressions. Currently, it looks like variables are limited to constants?

Cheers!

[simonbrowndotje]

Element/relationship properties are shown via the tooltips, which can be toggled on/off via the toolbar button -> https://structurizr.com/help/diagrams

[mathias-muench]

Hi! I have a similar question and want to discuss a possible solution.

I am looking for a way in the DSL to set the "Technology" label on a relation differently depending on the view. Depending on the target group, quite different "technologies" are of interest: application protocol, encryption, authentication, possibly even concrete DNS names.

My idea was to use properties for the different technologies at each relation. Unfortunately, the properties cannot simply be displayed or selected. The tooltips are nice for interactive use, but are not helpful in static documentation. However, I suspect that it should be possible to do this with a few lines of Groovy script in the view.

Can anyone give me a hint as to how something like this might look?

Regards, Mathias

[mathias-muench]

Basically, it works as expected. When I run the following DSL code, I get the diagram as a result and can choose between protocol and authentication. One drawback: The script changes the model, not the view. So it is not possible to show different properties in different views.

workspace {

        model {
                user = person "User" "A user of my software system."
                softwareSystem = softwareSystem "Software System" "My software system."

                user -> softwareSystem "Uses" {
                        properties {
                                protocol HTTP
                                authentication OIDC
                        }
                }
        }

        views {
                !script groovy {
                        workspace.model.relationshipsById.each{ it.value.technology = it.value.properties.get("authentication") }
                }                                                                                             

                systemContext softwareSystem "SystemContext" {
                        include *
                        autoLayout
                }

                styles {
                        element "Software System" {
                                background #1168bd
                                color #ffffff
                        }
                        element "Person" {
                                shape person
                                background #08427b
                                color #ffffff
                        }
                }
        }

}