nifdi

Building diagrams with nifdi

nifdi is a structured diagram editor: containers, text and icons, wired by paths. Reach for it when the picture is boxes and arrows. It is not a vector canvas — the server owns layout, and completes and repairs geometry rather than honouring pixel-exact composition. Fighting that is the single most expensive mistake available here.

The model in one screen

A diagram is a tree of blocks plus paths that wire them.

• container — a box that holds other blocks. Nesting is containment: a <container> holds its children directly, and there is no nested <canvas>.
• text — words.
• icon — artwork, referenced by asset="library:name" (find one with search_icons) or asset="#asset-…" for artwork already in the diagram.
• path — a connector between two blocks, wired through <from> and <to>.

Blocks carry pos="x y" and size="w h", both optional. Omitted geometry is completed by the server; a declared pos arranges blocks against one another rather than fixing canvas coordinates. Style is a <style> block of selector { property: value; } rules with nifdi's own semantic property names — not CSS.

Keep the diagram id

There is no current diagram. create_diagram returns the id every diagram-scoped tool needs; for an existing diagram, get that id from list_diagrams. Keep it and pass it as diagramId on every call that reads, edits, preflights or renders that diagram. A pasted editor URL is also accepted wherever diagramId is taken.

What an id looks like, and what it means, depends on where the server keeps diagrams. Read one of these before your first create_diagram: