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This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: "MscGen" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2017)

Mscgen (short for MSC generator) is a software tool for drawing message sequence charts from a simple to manage text-based source file. Rendered charts can be output in PNG, SVG and PostScript, with hyperlink information in ismap format. There is an extension for MediaWiki, Sphinx (documentation generator) and integration with Doxygen that allows embedding of charts into source code comments with generated automatically inserted into the generated documentation page. Mscgen is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Examples

The following example is from the author:

msc {
  a,b,c;
  a->b   ;
  b->c  ;
  c=>c  ;
  c=>c  ;
  ...;
  c=>c  ;
  c=>c  ;
  a<<=c ;
  ---   ;
  a->a  ;
  a->c  ;
  b<-c  ;
  b->b  ;
  a<-b  ;
}

Here are two examples of input and output for some standard SIP message flows:

Simple Call Flow

msc {
  UAS1, UAC;
  UAS1->UAC ;
  UAS1<-UAC ;
  UAS1<-UAC ;
  ---      ;
  UAS1<-UAC ;
  UAS1->UAC ;
  ...;
  ---      ;
  UAS1<-UAC ;
  UAS1<-UAC ;
}

Alice calls Bob with Intermediary Proxies

msc {
  Alice, P1, P2, Bob;
  Alice->P1 ;
  Alice<-P1 ;
  P1->P2    ;
  P1=>>P2    ;
  P2->Bob   ;
  P2<-Bob   ;
  P2<-Bob   ;
  P1<-P2    ;
  Alice<-P1 ;
  ---       ;
  ...;
  ---       ;
  P2<-Bob   ;
  P1<-P2    ;
  Alice<-P1 ;
  Alice->P1 ;
  P1->P2    ;
  P2->Bob   ;
  ---       ;
  ...;
}

See also

• Message Sequence Chart
• Doxygen
• Sphinx (documentation generator)
• GraphViz for similar software for directed graphing
• PlantUML

References

1. "Specification Languages - MSC". portal.etsi.org. Retrieved 2024-08-15.

External links

• http://www.mcternan.me.uk/mscgen/
• http://packages.python.org/sphinxcontrib-mscgen/

• UML tools
• Free documentation generators
• Free diagramming software