📈 My Site API shown via Mermaid

19 Apr, 2020

I recently learned about mermaid.js, a library for declarative charts that’s Markdown-friendly. I wanted to play with it, so here we are.

While it is still a JS library, I don’t have to write any special JS to use it; all I had to do was load the library and make a couple <div>s on the page. Currently, I’m using a Hugo shortcode I wrote to declare that <div> (since I’m making it a practice to avoid inline HTML in Markdown), but I’m hoping that soon we may see support for render templates for code blocks and eventually Markdown adding code block syntax for rendering because I want to avoid being tied to a specific library as well.

Let’s make some charts

Here’s a couple simple Pie charts with stats I pulled from the JSON-LD/Schema.org-based API I added to my sites recently, along with their code :

pie title Content Distribution by Site "Blog" : 36 "Visualizations" : 6 "Food" : 5 "Photos" : 1
pie title Content Distribution by Site
  "Blog" : 36
  "Visualizations" : 6
  "Food" : 5
  "Photos" : 1

Pretty easy, right? Here’s another:

pie title Content Distribution by Schema.org Type "BlogPosting" : 36 "WebPage" : 10 "Recipe" : 1 "ImageGallery" : 1

Vega

After I learned about mermaid, I was doing a little research and found out that there’s another library called Vega-Lite, which has a very similar premise but is based more on data charting than diagrams. TL;DR, Vega was easy to throw in as well, so here’s a demo. Vega-Lite uses a JSON object to declare its data, unlike Mermaid, which uses a text notation.

Here are the same charts as above, but in Vega:

Code for the left/first, based on this example, but with a tooltip added:

{
  "$schema": "https://vega.github.io/schema/vega-lite/v4.json",
  "description": "Pie chart of content by site",
  "data": {
    "values": [
      {"category": "Blog", "value": 36},
      {"category": "Visualizations", "value": 6},
      {"category": "Food", "value": 5},
      {"category": "Photos", "value": 1}
    ]
  },
  "mark": {"type": "arc", "tooltip": true},
  "encoding": {
    "theta": {"field": "value", "type": "quantitative"},
    "color": {"field": "category", "type": "nominal"}
  },
  "view": {"stroke": null}
}

It’s a lot longer to write, but Vega-Lite is prettier/more user-friendly, more powerful, has a lot more support for chart types, and is used by many large companies.

More Mermaid

Here are a few more visualizations of creating the API and the search engine based on it. I’m using Mermaid for these since I want diagrams and Vega-Lite doesn’t have those.

Here’s what I currently provide for Schema output from the root API call. Note that WebPage as mainEntityOfPage is the same Schema @type as the WebPage class, but has different properties given. Most values are strings because of how they’re expected to be encoded. The Schema relationships are also visible here, so you can see how ImageGallery is a child of WebPage, but BlogPosting and Recipe have to define their relationship explicitly (note that Schema says any web page is implicitly a WebPage, but this isn’t always respected).

classDiagram Array *-- WebSite Array *-- ItemList ItemList o-- ListItem ListItem *-- Recipe ListItem *-- BlogPosting ListItem *-- ImageGallery ListItem *-- WebPage BlogPosting --> WebPage ImageGallery --|> WebPage Recipe --> WebPage class Array class BlogPosting{ +String datePublished +String description +String headline +String image +WebPage mainEntityOfPage } class ImageGallery{ +String datePublished +String description +String image +String name +String url } class ItemList{ +Array~ListItem~ itemListElement +Number numberOfItems +String url } class ListItem{ +Thing item +Number position } class Recipe{ +String cookTime +String datePublished +String description +String image +WebPage mainEntityOfPage +String name +String prepTime +Array~String~ recipeIngredient +Array~String~ recipeInstructions +String totalTime +String yield } class WebPage{ +String description +String name +String url +String datePublished } class WebSite{ +String url }

Here’s a snippet of that:

classDiagram
  Array *-- WebSite

  class Array
  class WebSite{
    +String url
  }

Here’s a diagram of what learning the Schema API syntax looked like. A lot of the confusion is because there are multiple correct ways to write Schema and Google implements its own variant of Schema that doesn’t technically contradict Schema per say but does have its own nuances. Most of the time was spent learning the syntax as opposed to writing code.

Sorry if this goes off-page…

stateDiagram learnS : Learn from Schema learnG : Learn from Google readGH : Read GitHub issues search : Search the web confuse : Confusion confuse2 : Still confused xref : Cross-reference rfc: Read an RFC [*] --> Idea Idea --> learnG learnG --> learnS learnS --> learnG learnG --> confuse learnS --> confuse confuse --> search search --> learnG search --> rfc rfc --> confuse confuse --> Sleep Sleep --> confuse confuse --> readGH readGH --> xref learnG --> xref learnS --> xref xref --> confuse2 confuse2 --> learnG confuse2 --> learnS confuse2 --> Aha Aha --> [*]

Here’s what the API looks like:

sequenceDiagram participant User participant Search participant APIs User->>Search : Loads Page Search->>APIs : Requests Content APIs-->>Search : Returns Schema Data Search->>Search : Parses & Simplifies Data Search->>Search : Calculates Filter Values Search->>User : Presents Search loop Filtering User->>Search : Filters/Searches Search->>Search : Applies to Data Search->>User : Updates Page end opt Finds Content User->>User : Clicks Link end

One final example, how my sites are deployed:

sequenceDiagram participant Me participant GitHub participant GitLab participant pages as GitLab Pages participant Cloudflare participant User loop Deploy Me->>GitHub : Push Content GitHub->>GitLab : Webhook GitLab->>GitHub : Fetch Repo GitHub-->>GitLab : (Repo) GitLab->>GitLab : CI Build GitLab->>pages : Deploy GitLab->>Cloudflare : Purge Cache end loop Visits Site User->>Cloudflare : Requests Page alt in cache Cloudflare->>User : Serves from Cache else not in cache Cloudflare->>pages : Requests Page pages-->>Cloudflare : (Page) opt cacheable Cloudflare->>Cloudflare : Puts in Cache end Cloudflare->>User : Serves Response end end

So yeah, Mermaid is pretty powerful for diagrams. The state diagram also demonstrated that it has some room for refinement, but regardless I’m really happy about what this enables me to do.