Solved data flow diagrams anyone?

Personally, I'd strongly recommend just jumping over this and using UML's activity diagrams instead to get all the goodies (most notably an actual language). Even if you won't produce anything other than an activity diagram you at least have a solid starting base and you can extend as you wish down the road.

When it comes to UML: I'm doing that pretty much every day. The single most important thing I can recommend is to use a proper modeller rather than a diagramming software. The spectrum there is pretty wide. On the low-end you have something like StarUML, mid-field is your typical EnterpriseArchitect and on the high end you'll find tools that are outside the reach of most of us such as Rhapsody.
I am not aware of any serious, real-life usable open-source UML modeller.
 
hm, I thought about activities and data flow viewing an application from slightly different angles. Maybe I shouldn't.

For activity diagrams I prefer the orderly strict drakon over UML.
 
I tend to use Visio 4.0 Technical on Windows 3.11 (not WfW) in DOSBox.

It sounds awkward but it has the following benefits:
  • The whole thing (emulator and all) is lighter than even Dia
  • Dependency is SDL and very little else
  • DOSBox has a para-virtualized filesystem so transferring files between is convenient
  • Supports vsd files (you can send to colleagues)
  • Has a wide range of templates (and is still mostly compatible with 3rd party ones)
  • Works well with the Adobe Acrobat 3.01 pdf printer driver
 
Not that I've drawn a data-flow diagram before, but for things like this I usually turn to PlantUML/Mermaid since it's just text that can easily be manipulated and versioned.

Taking a quick look, it is possible in PlantUML but a bit hacky it seems.
However, it seems that while there is no specific documentation for data-flow diagrams in Mermaid, a PR was raised and merged (and later refined) a couple of years ago that added the required components so that a flowchart could be used to create data-flow diagrams.
 
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Reactions: mro
kpedersen said:
I tend to use Visio 4.0 Technical on Windows 3.11 (not WfW) in DOSBox.

It sounds awkward but it has the following benefits:
  • The whole thing (emulator and all) is lighter than even Dia
  • Dependency is SDL and very little else
  • DOSBox has a para-virtualized filesystem so transferring files between is convenient
  • Supports vsd files (you can send to colleagues)
  • Has a wide range of templates (and is still mostly compatible with 3rd party ones)
  • Works well with the Adobe Acrobat 3.01 pdf printer driver
Click to expand...
lol, that's an original one! But I'm done with UML activities (however I find sequence, deployment, use-case diagrams helpful).
 
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