What modeling technique/tool/diagram would you recommend for a rails/grails application?

Question

I am interesting in a diagramming methodology that can capture user-interaction in a way that will incorporate the "screens" along with the "actions", and how those are driven by controllers,views and services.

Answer 1

You could read this interesting article http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1926-a-shorthand-for-designing-ui-flows from 37 signals (the firm that brought Rails to life).

I hoppe it helps you.

Answer 2

Diagrams for your business models can easily be acquired using a tool like this handy Ruby script for dumping your current ActiveRecord schema into UML. It produces XMI 1.1 for UML 1.3 (viewable, for instance, in StarUML.)

A simple rake task utilizing it might look something like:

namespace :uml do
  desc "Generates db/schema.xml file describing the current DB as seen by AR."
  task :schema => :environment do
    require 'lib/uml_dumper.rb'
    File.open("db/schema.xml", "w") do |file|
      ActiveRecord::UmlDumper.dump(ActiveRecord::Base.connection, file)
    end 
    puts "Done. Schema XMI created as db/schema.xml."
  end
end

Once you've got your models in there, it's just a matter of creating relationships describing the relationships between your data layer (your models' design pattern) and the business logic/presentation layer (view-controller design patterns).

However, unless your project has some truly extraordinary requirements, you are almost certainly over-engineering your interface. The presentation/action diagrams mentioned earlier and championed by 37signals are ideal for capturing 80% of user stories.

In short: if a lot of your interactions are growing so labyrinthine you feel the need for a secondary modelling language to describe them, it might be time to think about why they are so complicated in the first place.