Graphing Ray.Di Applications

When you’ve written a sophisticated application, Ray.Di rich introspection API can describe the object graph in detail. The object-visual-grapher exposes this data as an easily understandable visualization. It can show the bindings and dependencies from several classes in a complex application in a unified diagram.

Generating a .dot file

Ray.Di’s grapher leans heavily on GraphViz, an open source graph visualization package. It cleanly separates graph specification from visualization and layout. To produce a graph .dot file for an Injector, you can use the following code:

use Ray\ObjectGrapher\ObjectGrapher;

$dot = (new ObjectGrapher)(new FooModule);
file_put_contents('path/to/graph.dot', $dot);

The .dot file

Executing the code above produces a .dot file that specifies a graph. Each entry in the file represents either a node or an edge in the graph. Here’s a sample .dot file:

digraph injector {
graph [rankdir=TB];
dependency_BEAR_Resource_ResourceInterface_ [style=dashed, margin=0.02, label=<<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5" cellborder="0" border="0"><tr><td align="left" port="header" bgcolor="#ffffff"><font color="#000000">BEAR\\Resource\\ResourceInterface<br align="left"/></font></td></tr></table>>, shape=box]
dependency_BEAR_Resource_FactoryInterface_ [style=dashed, margin=0.02, label=<<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5" cellborder="0" border="0"><tr><td align="left" port="header" bgcolor="#ffffff"><font color="#000000">BEAR\\Resource\\FactoryInterface<br align="left"/></font></td></tr></table>>, shape=box]
dependency_BEAR_Resource_ResourceInterface_ -> class_BEAR_Resource_Resource [style=dashed, arrowtail=none, arrowhead=onormal]
dependency_BEAR_Resource_FactoryInterface_ -> class_BEAR_Resource_Factory [style=dashed, arrowtail=none, arrowhead=onormal]
}

Rendering the .dot file

You can then paste that code into GraphvizOnlineto render it.

On Linux, you can use the command-line dot tool to convert .dot files into images.

dot -T png graph.dot > graph.png

graph

Graph display

Edges:

  • Solid edges represent dependencies from implementations to the types they depend on.
  • Dashed edges represent bindings from types to their implementations.
  • Double arrows indicate that the binding or dependency is to a Provider.

Nodes:

  • Implementation types are given black backgrounds.
  • Implementation instances have gray backgrounds.