Nodetype visualization

This page explains an easy way to make a visualization of the primary nodetypes and their relations found on a server by using standard features in the JCR. The original idea comes from this page and was adapted a little bit.

1 Requirements

First of all you will need the following software:

• Graphiz : Graph Visualization Software
• Saxon : XSLT Processor
• A running eXo server

2 How it works

The JCR standard has a buildin function in the session object to serialize a node recursively and save it into an XML file. Let's do this from the location where the nodetypes are stored:

session.exportSystemView("/jcr:system/jcr:nodetypes", bufferedOutputStream, false, false);

The result is a file like this example, build from the eXo JCR 1.1 release.

Once you have this system view export, run the whole xml file through a xslt transformation to create the input for the dot command, part of graphiz, that will render it into an svg file:

saxon jcr-export-jcr-1.1-formatted.xml jcr-nodetypes-to-dot.xslt > jcr-export-jcr-1.1.dot
dot jcr-export-jcr-1.1.dot -Tsvg -o jcr-export-jcr-1.1.svg

That's it!

3 Result

Download full svg file