Getting the information from the AEF isn't the problem, that part is easy. Creating some kind of diagramming documentation out of it is the challenge.
Think about the detail that exists in an AEF file, step by step. Now think about how you create your diagrams. I'd guess you do not do a 1:1 ratio of steps to shapes on your Visio, that'd be way too verbose and there are simply details you wouldn't communicate at a higher level; an application that would do this 1:1 step to shape diagram is no better than a tool that would print out the steps.
When I developed ContactView I wanted to do exactly as you suggest, build diagrams from AEFs.
After a year of work, here is a snippet of the best possible outcomes reading an AEF and producing a diagram:
This represents the accumulation of all that time and it is the best outcome we could generate. This type of output was possible on very well formatted AEF files.
In a real word scenario what we got instead was a mess, there are so many edge cases in the way that people build AEFs that is is nearly impossible to create a clean, meaningful graph. Even this snippet:
Which might look like a nice orderly graph is a mess of set steps and other low level implementation steps that provide no meaningful value to the viewer .
How do you handle fall through? How do you handle portions of code that live in total isolation, etc etc. There are so many edge cases that providing a graph that looks clean and actually conveys the information is tremendously difficult.
Once we came to this conclusion we shifted gears, said this would be an aid, build out the majority of the Visio and let you, the user, fine tune it for your audience. What we ultimately found out is that it was SLOWER for the user to edit our generated Visio into something meaningful than it was to simply create a new one from scratch using the AEF as a reference.
By now it became clear this was not a magic bullet to building documentation automatically. There isn't one. We then decided to reverse the process, start with a clear, concise, easy to understand and easy to program graph that built the AEF as the end result. In this sense, the graph, your code, your documentation are always in sync.
This is what ContactView is today,
a tool for creating meaningful, concise and clear scripts for UCCX that are self documenting.
I guarantee you that building your call flow diagrams is faster in ContactView than it is to do it in Visio; with the side benefit of getting an extremely robust script out of it.
Regards,
Tanner Ezell
ContactView - Visually Create AEFs for Cisco's UCCX
