Visual Paradigm Plugins

Visual Paradigm is a great tool for software system design and architecture. This is a set of useful plugins that I have developed and use.

Confluence Plugin

This plugin provides the ability to export diagrams as attachments to Atlassian Confluence using the REST API.

Design Plugin

This plugin provides a set of useful design patterns and templates:

• model element stereotypes
• diagram element styles

Also there is a useful feature to auto-apply styles to diagram elements based on their stereotypes.

DevTools Plugin

This plugin is only useful during plugin development and normally should not be installed.

Build and Install

Apache Maven is used as a build tool and needs to be installed and available as mvn.

Build All Plugins

mvn -Pall-plugins clean install

Build Single Plugin

Sometimes it is useful to build/install a single plugin. Run to build a confluence plugin:

mvn -Pconfluence-plugin clean install

Installation

There are several ways to install a plugin to Visual Paradigm:

• Help > Install Plugin > Install from a zip of a plugin - select plugin .jar file
• install locally using maven (e.g. during development) using install profile:

  mvn -Pall-plugins -Pinstall clean install

Development

Debugging

To enable debugging the JVM:

1. Locate the vplauncher.vmoptions file containing the JVM launch arguments. On Mac, this file is located at the following path: ~/Library/Application Support/VisualParadigm/vplauncher.vmoptions
2. Add these lines to vplauncher.vmoptions:

   -Xdebug
   -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=5005
   

Class Reloading

DevTools plugin provides the ability to reload all the plugin classes using the Visual Paradigm API. Unfortunately this API only reloads the classes, so any changes to plugin.xml (UI modifications, plugin definition, etc.) require Visual Paradigm application to be restarted.