How to use doxygen to create UML class diagrams from C++ source

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Hmm, this seems to be a bit of an old question, but since I’ve been messing about with Doxygen configuration last few days, while my head’s still full of current info let’s have a stab at it –

I think the previous answers almost have it:

The missing option is to add COLLABORATION_GRAPH = YES in the Doxyfile. I assume you can do the equivalent thing somewhere in the doxywizard GUI (I don’t use doxywizard).

So, as a more complete example, typical “Doxyfile” options related to UML output that I tend to use are:

EXTRACT_ALL          = YES
CLASS_DIAGRAMS      = YES
HIDE_UNDOC_RELATIONS = NO
HAVE_DOT             = YES
CLASS_GRAPH          = YES
COLLABORATION_GRAPH  = YES
UML_LOOK             = YES
UML_LIMIT_NUM_FIELDS = 50
TEMPLATE_RELATIONS   = YES
DOT_GRAPH_MAX_NODES  = 100
MAX_DOT_GRAPH_DEPTH  = 0
DOT_TRANSPARENT      = YES

These settings will generate both “inheritance” (CLASS_GRAPH=YES) and “collaboration” (COLLABORATION_GRAPH=YES) diagrams.

Depending on your target for “deployment” of the doxygen output, setting DOT_IMAGE_FORMAT = svg may also be of use. With svg output the diagrams are “scalable” instead of the fixed resolution of bitmap formats such as .png. Apparently, if viewing the output in browsers other than IE, there is also INTERACTIVE_SVG = YES which will allow “interactive zooming and panning” of the generated svg diagrams. I did try this some time ago, and the svg output was very visually attractive, but at the time, browser support for svg was still a bit inconsistent, so hopefully that situation may have improved lately.

As other comments have mentioned, some of these settings (DOT_GRAPH_MAX_NODES in particular) do have potential performance impacts, so YMMV.

I tend to hate “RTFM” style answers, so apologies for this sentence, but in this case the Doxygen documentation really is your friend, so check out the Doxygen docs on the above mentioned settings- last time I looked you can find the details at http://www.doxygen.nl/manual/config.html.

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