Sharing: Exports

The model is the truth — but your audience reads wikis, pull requests, and slide decks. Bausteinsicht exports to whatever they consume.

Text diagrams: PlantUML, Mermaid, D2 and friends

bausteinsicht export-diagram --view context
@startuml
!include <C4/C4_Context>

Person(customer, "Customer", "End user who browses products and places orders")
System(onlineshop, "Online Shop", "E-commerce platform for selling products online")
System_Ext(payment_provider, "Payment Provider", "Stripe API", "Processes credit card and bank transfer payments")

Rel(customer, onlineshop, "browses & orders")
Rel(onlineshop, payment_provider, "charges payment")
@enduml

That is proper C4-PlantUML, ready for any docs-as-code pipeline. The --diagram-format flag switches the dialect:

Format Use it for

plantuml (default)

C4-PlantUML for AsciiDoc/docToolchain pipelines

mermaid

GitHub READMEs and merge-request descriptions — renders inline

d2 / dot

D2 and Graphviz toolchains

html

A self-contained interactive HTML page

structurizr

Structurizr DSL — take your model with you

Output goes to stdout by default; use --output <dir> to write files. Omit --view to export all views at once.

Tip
 sync --mermaid maintains an always-current architecture.md with Mermaid diagrams next to your model — useful when the repository README should always show the latest architecture.

Sequence diagrams from dynamic views

Static structure is half the story. The model also supports dynamicViews — ordered interaction steps across your elements:

"dynamicViews": {
  "checkout-flow": {
    "title": "Checkout Flow",
    "steps": [
      { "from": "customer", "to": "onlineshop.mobile-app", "label": "tap 'Place Order'" },
      { "from": "onlineshop.mobile-app", "to": "onlineshop.api", "label": "POST /orders" },
      { "from": "onlineshop.api", "to": "payment-provider", "label": "charge card" }
    ]
  }
}

The scaffolded sample model ships one. Render it:

bausteinsicht export-sequence
@startuml checkout_flow
title Checkout Flow

participant "Customer" as customer
participant "Mobile App" as onlineshop_mobile_app
participant "REST API" as onlineshop_api
...
customer -> onlineshop_mobile_app : 1. tap 'Place Order'

Rendered, the sample model’s checkout flow becomes a full sequence diagram — the same dynamicViews steps, now readable at a glance:

tutorial checkout

--diagram-format mermaid produces the Mermaid sequenceDiagram equivalent.

Tables for the spreadsheet people

bausteinsicht export-table --view context
=== System Context

[cols="2,1,1,3"]
|===
| Element | Kind | Technology | Description

| Customer
| actor
|
| End user who browses products and places orders
...

AsciiDoc by default, --table-format md for Markdown, --combined for one deduplicated table across all views. --format json emits the raw rows for further processing.

Images: PNG and SVG

For slide decks and wikis that want pixels:

bausteinsicht export --view context --image-format png

This drives the draw.io desktop app headlessly, so it requires draw.io installed on the machine. --image-format svg, --scale 2 for high-DPI (scale factors above 1 need a hardware GPU), --output <dir> to choose the destination. In containers, see the devcontainer notes in the repository — headless draw.io needs xvfb and a dbus daemon.

Continue with 5. Analysis and Evolution.