Visualizing Project Requirements with Mermaid Flowcharts in OpenRose

OpenRose transforms requirements data with powerful Mermaid flowchart integration, making complex processes simple to visualize. Perfect for teams and professionals seeking smarter, faster ways to manage project requirements and share well‑defined content effectively. Bring your scoped requirements into structured flowcharts that emphasize traceability and clarity throughout the lifecycle.

Introduction

Managing complex projects often requires more than text-based requirements lists. Visual diagrams help teams and stakeholders quickly understand relationships, dependencies, and scope. With the latest release of OpenRose (v0.2.0-161), available on GitHub - OpenRose, users can now natively generate Mermaid flowchart diagram text directly from within the tool.

This feature makes it possible to instantly visualize entire projects, specific requirement types, or even scoped snapshots — all while preserving traceability.

Generating a Mermaid Diagram for a Project

The demo began with a Charity Fundraising Project. By copying the project ID and selecting Export Mermaid Diagram, OpenRose produced Mermaid text for the entire project in seconds.

Solid lines represent parent-child relationships.
Dotted lines represent traceability links.

Pasting this text into a diagramming tool rendered the complete project structure, including all requirements and their connections. This visualization can be shared with project team members, stakeholders, customers, or partners to discuss coverage and relationships.

Why Scoping Matters

Not every conversation requires the full project view. OpenRose supports six scoping options, allowing users to export diagrams at different levels:

Entire project for a holistic view.
Requirement type to focus on a specific category.
Individual requirement and sub-requirements for detailed breakdowns.
Snapshots to capture baselines and experiment with removing or adjusting items.
Baseline Requirement Type
Baseline Individual requirement and sub-requirements for detailed breakdowns.

Snapshots are particularly powerful. For example, removing a single requirement (like item 4 or item 6) shows how parent-child and traceability links change, helping teams decide what to include or exclude in a target release. Similarly, removing an entire item type demonstrates how structural relationships shift when scoping data in or out.

For example, while discussing entire Project with Project Team, One could generate diagram for entire project and discuss and share it with entire team. On the other hand, while working with a component supplier, one could generate diagram scoped to a specific ItemzType which perhaps defines requirements for a component only.

Another example would be to capture snapshot / baseline of the Project requirement and perform trade-off analysis and negotiation. Once that is done then one could create diagram for specific agreed baseline scoped data by excluding requirements and traces that are removed from the snapshot / baseline.

Likewise there might be many different reason for generating scoped requirements structure and traceability matrix diagrams.

Deep Hierarchy Projects

The demo then moved to a Deep Hierarchy Level Project, with relationships spanning up to nine levels. OpenRose generated the full structure in a single view, including traceability links between top-level and bottom-level records.

A standout capability is the embedded links in exported diagrams. Clicking on any item takes you back to its detailed view in OpenRose — whether hosted locally or on a custom domain. Users can toggle between detail view and tree view, making navigation seamless between the diagram and the underlying project data.

Scope-Based Exports for Targeted Collaboration

Finally, the demo illustrated how scope-based exports can be tailored for specific audiences. For example, when collaborating with a supplier, you might only want to share Item Type One (representing a component). By exporting just that scope, you provide focused visibility without overwhelming external partners with unrelated details.

Design Decisions

When we set out to export requirements into Mermaid diagrams, we had to make some choices about how the diagrams should look and how each node should be identified. These weren’t just technical details — they were about making the diagrams easy to read, unambiguous, and reliable. Here’s what we decided and why:

Indentation

Think of indentation like the way you write an outline or a shopping list with sub‑items. Each level of the hierarchy is indented by 4 spaces. Why? Because when you look at the raw text, you can immediately see which items belong under which parent. Even before you render the diagram, the text itself is readable and gives you a sense of structure.

Shapes

We chose different shapes to make it obvious what role each node plays:

The root node (like the Project itself) is drawn as a circle ((...)). Circles stand out visually, so you can instantly spot the starting point of the diagram.

All other nodes are rectangles [ ... ]. Rectangles are simple, uniform, and easy to stack in a flowchart. This way, your eye is drawn to the circle at the top, and then follows the rectangles down through the hierarchy.

In plain terms: circles say “this is the big thing,” rectangles say “these are the parts inside it.”

Prefixes

We add prefixes like Project ::, ItemzType ::, Baseline ::, and BaselineItemzType :: before the names. Why? Because when you’re looking at a diagram, names alone can be ambiguous. For example, “Parking Lot” could be an ItemzType or a BaselineItemzType. By adding a prefix, you always know what kind of thing you’re looking at. It’s like labeling boxes in your garage — you don’t just write “Tools,” you write “Garden Tools” or “Car Tools” so you know exactly what’s inside.

GUID IDs

Every node in the diagram is identified by a GUID (Globally Unique Identifier). Why? Because in a real project, names can be duplicated or changed over time. A GUID is like a fingerprint — it uniquely identifies each requirement, ItemzType, or baseline record. By showing GUIDs in the diagram, users can be confident they’re looking at the exact record from the system, not just something with a similar name. It’s the same way the application itself keeps track of records internally, so the diagram stays consistent with the data model.

Why We Chose Mermaid Flow Chart Text Instead of a Graph Component

When designing the export feature in OpenRose, we deliberately chose Mermaid Flow Chart text output rather than embedding a heavy graph component directly into the Web UI. The core reason is that users need flexibility: they want diagrams that can be copied, shared, embedded in documentation, and rendered in many different environments — not locked inside one proprietary viewer.

Advantages of Mermaid Flow Chart Text

Universal and Portable

Mermaid diagrams are plain text. This means the output can be copied into wikis, Markdown files, Confluence pages, GitHub repositories, or the Mermaid Live Editor. Users are not tied to OpenRose alone; they can take the diagram anywhere.

Readable Without Rendering

Because the text is indented and formatted, users can understand the hierarchy even before rendering. This makes the export useful both as a diagram and as a structured text outline.

Lightweight and Future‑proof

A graph component embedded in the UI would require complex layout engines, canvas rendering, zooming, and printing support. Mermaid text avoids that overhead. It’s simple to generate, easy to maintain, and future‑proof because Mermaid is widely adopted across modern documentation platforms.

Supports Large and Complex Diagrams

Advanced diagramming tools often struggle with layout, pagination, and printing when diagrams become very large. By exporting text, OpenRose sidesteps those limitations. Users can render the diagram in whichever tool best suits their needs — whether that’s a wiki for collaboration, a PDF for printing, or a live editor for interactive exploration.

Aligns with Modern Practices

Many modern applications are moving toward text‑based diagram definitions (Mermaid, PlantUML, Graphviz). This approach separates the definition of the diagram from the rendering. It gives users control over how and where diagrams are displayed, rather than forcing them into one fixed UI component.

Users get to choose thier preferred diagraming tool

We didn’t embed a graph component because that would have locked users into one way of viewing diagrams, with limited layout and printing options. Instead, by exporting Mermaid Flow Chart text, we give users a flexible, portable format that works across tools and scales to large projects. It’s a modern, lightweight approach that matches how teams collaborate today: copy the text, paste it where you need it, and render it in the environment that makes the most sense.

Key Takeaways

OpenRose’s native Mermaid diagram export feature transforms project management by making structures and relationships instantly visual.

Generate diagrams for entire projects or scoped subsets.
Preserve traceability while experimenting with snapshots.
Navigate seamlessly between diagrams and project records.
Share targeted views with stakeholders, customers, or suppliers.

Whether you’re managing a charity fundraising initiative or a deep hierarchy project, this feature ensures clarity, collaboration, and confidence in project discussions.

Thank you for supporting OpenRose. We’re excited to see how you’ll use the GoTo feature to streamline your workflows and enhance your project management experience.

OpenRose, a free and open-source requirements management application / tool. For more information, visit

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