Scripting OmniGraffle: MySQL Visualization & JSON Representations

OmniGraffle is a great tool for visually mapping out complex relationships or hierarchical structures. Often when working in groups where some of the personnel have no programming or mathematical background OmniGraffle is a great tool to bridge the gap.

Converting OmniGraffle Hierarchy to JSON

Often I’ll use OmniGraffle to map out site structures with non-programmers. The challenge is once everything has been done in OmniGraffle it is normally a manual process to convert the data in OmniGraffle to a structured data representation, like JSON, that is easy to programmatically work with. Or, in my specific case, output the structured OmniGraffle document into a text document that could be reviewed and edited by others on a Google Doc. I wrote a script to pull structured data out of an OmniGraffle document.

Visual MySQL Database Structure in OmniGraffle

Pretty cool tool to visual a MySQL database in OmniGraffle (including foreign keys!). I did not write the original version, but I modified it to work with the latest version of OmniGraffle. Check out the modified MySQL to OmniGraffle visualizer.