Status	Owner	Importance	Complexity	MD Version
Pending		Normal	High

Overview

It would be useful to has a visual tool for browsing and editing the class hierarchy, like the class diagram tool in Visual Studio or UML editors.

Features

Exploring

The canvas would allow exploring the types available in MonoDevelop’s internal Code DOM. This means it will work for source code and assemblies.

• The canvas would show types (classes/interfaces/enums/structs) as items with lists of members and the base classes/interfaces.
• The different kinds of members within each type should be grouped into collapsible sections.
• Items’ members and base class/interfaces should be expandable with a click. This would add the corresponding type’s item to the diagram, linked by an arrow (or a double-arrow for IEnumerable collections).
• It should be possible to rearrange items on the canvas by dragging the headers.
• Double-clicking on an item should jump to the source code.
• The diagram should be serialised to/from a file, preferably the XML .cd file format the Visual Studio uses.
• Printing and exporting PNG files would be useful.

Editing

• When the language binding for a project supports refactoring features, the class diagram should expose some of those features from the GUI, e.g. renaming, adding/removing members, creating classes, etc.

Implementation

Tasks

• Basic addin infrastructure
  • Extend /MonoDevelop/Ide/DisplayBindings with a view that can handle .cd files.
  • Registering the mimetype with MonoDevelop.
  • Add a template for a new .cd file.
  • Add a command to the code context menu to launch the diagram view from an existing class.
• Implement the canvas using moonlight
  • dragging objects
  • links/arrows and routing
  • autolayout
• Interface it to the code completion database for type information.
• Implement a property provider for editing types using MD’s Refactorer engine.
• Add a pad for editing types’ members using the Refactorer.
• Implement a toolbox provider so that new types can be dragged from the toolbox.

Justification for using Moonlight

• A stable canvas
• Has a good Mono binding
• Can load shapes and animations from XAML – makes theming and graphical prettiness much easier
• Good demo of Moonlight in an app; dogfooding Moonlight

Shared Designer Canvas

It would be useful if the designer canvas were a re-usable component, so that it could be used for visualising things like database tables and relationship. As long as the canvas is well-separated from the form of the actual data it’s visualising, this should not be hard.