Support configuration inside needflow

As of now, needflow provides configuration inside “needs_flow_configs”. This is not sufficient especially when aligning and positioning different need flow elements for rendering.

Eg: In the example below

.. needflow:: Title
   :link_types: 
   :show_link_names:
   :config: toptobottom,cplant   
   :show_legend:
   :align: center

There is no way to position the need elements in a definite order or place. Also, there is no way to define the direction of each puml element.

This results in unorganized rendered elements.

[twodrops]

What purpose are you using needflow for? As the name suggests it is for showing the relation between need objects only. For everything else, you will have to use needuml as @danwos suggested.

Another tip would be to keep the scope of each ‘needflow’ small by using filters or using filter functions. It is not really meant to visualize 100s of need objects in one diagram, but rather partition your scope and create smaller diagrams. For larger reporting, I would import needs.json and use an external reporting tool like Splunk, Grafana etc. which could offer you more dynamic visualization, filtering etc.

[danwos]

For 2): No, no postprocessing is available. needflow generates a PlantUML string only. It knows nothing about the PlantUML data model or has access to it. So each postprocessing would have access to the overall generated string only, which may have 10-200 lines. You can see the output when using the :debug: flag.

For 1): Maybe, but it would be link-type based and affects all needs using this link type. Have a look into our need_etra_links style docs.

You could set it like this:

needs_extra_links = [
   {
      "option": "tests",
      "incoming": "is tested by",
      "outgoing": "tests",
      "copy": False,
      "style_start": "<-",
      "style_end": "left-->",  # Direction added
   }

But I’m not sure if this is really helpful.

However, all we can do is give you the possibility to write your own PlantUML code and use the mechanism of PlantUML. This is done by needuml, which has also access to all need-data and allows to write filter-own logics by using Jinja.