BeerRiot Blog

Webmachine hackers are familiar with a certain flowchart representing the decisions made during the processing of an HTTP request. Webmachine was designed as a practical executable form of that flowchart.

It has long bugged many of the Webmachine hackers that this relationship is one-way, though. Webmachine was made from the graph, but the graph wasn’t made from Webmachine. I decided to change that in my evenings last week, while trying to take my mind off of Riak 1.0 testing.

This is a version of the HTTP flowchart that only a Webmachine hacker could love. It’s ugly and missing some information, but the important part is that it’s generated by parsing webmachine_decision_core.erl.

I’ve shared the code for generating this image in the gen-graph branch of my webmachine fork. Make sure you have Graphviz installed, then checkout that branch and run make graph && open docs/wdc_graph.png.

In addition to the PNG, you’ll also find a docs/wdc_graph.dot if you prefer to render to some other format.

If you’d really like to dig in, I suggest firing up an Erlang node and looking at the output of wdc_graph:parse("src/webmachine_decision_core.erl"):

[{v3b13, [ping],                     [v3b13b,503]},
 {v3b13b,[service_available],        [v3b12,503]},
 {v3b12, [known_methods],            [v3b11,501]},
 {v3b11, [uri_too_long],             [414,v3b10]},
 {v3b10, [allowed_methods,'RESPOND'],[v3b9,405]},
 {v3b9,  [malformed_request],        [400,v3b8]},
...

If you’ve looked through webmachine_decision_core at all, I think you’ll recognize what’s presented above: a list of tuples, each one representing the decision named by the first element, with the calls made to a resource module as the second element, and the possible outcomes as the third element. Call wdc_graph:dot/2 to convert those tuples to a DOT file.

There are a few holes in the generation. Some response codes are reached by decisions spread across the graph, causing long arrows to cross confusingly. The edges between decisions aren’t labeled with the criteria for following them. Some resource calls are left out (like those made from webmachine_decision_core:respond/1 and the response body producers and encoders). It’s good to have a nice list for future tinkering.