White space issues about c4-plantuml

[aheil]

The layout should be based on the capabilities and limitations of GraphViz. There is also a current discussion if GraphViz should be included in PlantUML. Said that, maybe there are more possibilities to deal with GraphViz layouts when using the C4 extension.

Link to the PlantUML forum: https://forum.plantuml.net/12468/plug-and-play-installation-for-windows

[adrianvlupu]

Hi, sadly this has more to do with plantUML itself rather than this library. There are a couple of workarounds in place, usually I tend to mess around with Rel_U, Rel_L, Rel_D, Rel_R to see what works best in these scenarios. There is also a hidden relationship that can be added to help out in these cases Lay_U, Lay_L, Lay_D, Lay_R.

It this particular diagram case I would go with

@startuml C4_Elements
!includeurl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RicardoNiepel/C4-PlantUML/release/1-0/C4_Container.puml

skinparam linetype ortho

LAYOUT_LEFT_RIGHT

Person(OrbitShareUser, "Orbit-Share User", "A User of the Orbit-Share web solution, with a personal UNI-Login Account")

System_Boundary(WebSolution, "Orbit-Share Web Solution"){
    Container(SPA, "Single-Page-Application", "Container: Angular", "Client containing all of the websites UI functionality for teachers using their preferenced web browser")
    Container(DeployedPage, "Deployed Web Server", "Container:Node.js, Express.js & Heroku CLI", "Deployed webserver")
    Container(API, "REST API", "Container:Node.js & Express.js", "Allows users to access and share teaching resources")
    ContainerDb(collectionDB, "Orbit-Share-Database", "Containts User, Content and Collection data into their respective collections")
}
System_Ext(UserDevice, "User's Device", "Stores the exported teaching resource(s) to the users device")
System_Ext(UniLogin, "UNI-Login Management System", "Optional Description")
System_Ext(OrbitBox, "ORBIT-Box", "A System that contains the sensors and actuators necessary to conduct a lessons experiments, can contain and view the teaching resource")

Rel(OrbitShareUser, DeployedPage, "Visits orbitshare.com", "HTTPS")
Rel(DeployedPage, SPA, "Delivers to user's browser")

Rel(SPA, API, "Makes API calls to", "HTTP")

Rel_L(API, collectionDB, "Reads from and writes to")
Rel(API, UserDevice, "Downloads teaching resource to")
Rel(API, UniLogin, "Authenticates user login using","SAML")
Rel(API, OrbitBox, "Exports Orbit-Box Files to")

@enduml

that ends up looking like this

[Bernold1]

Hi @adrianvlupu thank you for the quick response! Looks really nice like that! Is there anyway you can write about Rel_U, Rel_L, Rel_D, Rel_R in the documentation for this project? But thank you!