Actor Framework Documents
Hello everyone,
For the purpose of preparing some materials about AF I found myself preparing sequence diagrams multiple times. Since this was a tedious task I decided to use some tools and make it easier. In the process I wrote a small Python script that is parsing DETT traces created by AF_Debug_Trace=TRUE in the project.
The python script parsed out the information about AF events and prepared syntaxt needed for PlantUML tools available online. The translated UML was saved to file and copied to clipboard. Then you can paste it to the online tool and you get nice looking and easy to read diagrams of the sequence of Actors' activities.
Steps to generate the diagram:
1. Install Python3
2. Install the packages required for the script to work: easygui, pyperclip
Installing the packages can be done with cmd command "pip install easygui" and "pip install pyperclip"
easygui is used to ask the user for paths to txt files
Pyperclip is used to copy the final string into clipboard
3. Enable AF_Debug_Trace in your AF project
4. Generate trace from your project
5. Save the trace in TXT file
6. Run the parser script in windows cmd line "python C:\YourPathHere\AFParser.py"
7. If everything went well your web browser should open and go to page http://www.planttext.com/planttext
8. Once you're there you can Ctrl + V the text from clipboard, click Refresh and you get your diagram.
I know that this is an annoying list of steps but once you go through them you will find them to be quick. If you want to make them even faster you can create a BAT file that would just run the CMD line from step 6. I include a file like this in the attachments. Notice that it uses an absolute path so you need to modify it to point to your script.
Example Diagram generated this way:
You can also preview a movie visualizing how you go though the steps.
Attached you can find the python script.
NOTE. If you find thet the "message sent" events are not captured by your DETT you need to remove and add again the conditional disable structure in the Message Enqueuer.vi. There seems to be something wrong with that structure, but once you replace it with something exactly the same, it works fine again.
I hope this is useful for someone.
Well the only thing you need to do is to install on some other machine LV2015, convert the AF libraries to previous version (i think everything should be compatible) and you have it.
Alternatively you can just add the functionality to send the user defined trace events yourself to the AF VIs.
Alternatively you can add your own events, take my parser and modify it to parse your events, and model that 
Hey all, can you please tell me what kind of improvements would you like to see with this tool? I was thinking of building a pure LV version that could be integrated as a tool in to the menus. It wouldn't require internet connection and any python parsing. This however would require me to build a custom toolkit or two. Can you please let me know if you are interested in something like this? I dont want to waste time
For now I have refined the parser a little bit. It is now removing the word Actor from the names, so be careful about that. Ive done it because i didnt like the prefix actor in front of everything in the diagram It's also parsing the types of messages a little better. The message no longer has to be a part of library to be parsed out. The new version is 1.1
How can this have 500+ downloads ?! I didn't know we had 500 customers using actors in LV 
Hi Piotr,
thank you for this helpful tool.
I just used it to debug/"re-engineer" my first AF-Project. 
I edited the script to handle time-delayed messages and added an additional case:
elif 'created Time-Delayed Message' in msg:
creator, what, typeof = dsplit(msg, ' created ', ' for ')
if '.lvlib:' in typeof:
not_used, typeof, not_used = dsplit(typeof, '.lvlib:', '.lvclass')
else:
typeofarr = typeof.split('.lvclass')
typeof = typeofarr[0]
text = 'create %s\n' % (leg(what))
text += '%s->%s:%s\n' % (leg(creator), leg(what), leg(typeof))
To automise the image creation I replaced planttext with plantUML and used hardcoded paths to avoid the filebrowser.
I'd like to use it in LabVIEW directly.
Let me know if the pure-LV solution is ready for testing
Here is the error i am getting from both the original and 1.1 version.
Note: I am running Python 3.6 (yes I know that is old, but it is a legacy system and that's what they have installed).
I may see if try to see if I can run it on another PC with a newer version of python.
Hey Sam,
Are you exporting the trace to a TXT file as per step 6 in the original post? It works for me with the export.
try changing line 39 to handle the text encoding as utf-8.
original: with open(path) as af: # With the text file as af
New: with open(path, encoding="UTF-8") as af: # With the text file as afAccording to the error code it is failing to convert a byte 0x9d which is not available in Windows cp1252, but according to the link below the UTF8 should support it.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49640513/unicodedecodeerror-charmap-codec-cant-decode-byte-0x9d-...
Best of luck
@.aCe.
Yes that was exactly my problem. I read step 5:
"5. Save the trace in TXT file"
As just click on save. However to get a true text file you have to export it.
