Styling elements differently depending on group

[toorog]

Since the enterprise element and location concepts were deprecated, I am trying to mimic the old colouring mechanism (External elements are greyish, internal bluish) using group styles.

According to this example, groups can be styled.

How do I style only the elements inside a given group?

Pseudo code describing what I try to achieve:

element "Group:External" {
  background #AFAFAF
  color #000000
}
element "Group:Internal" {
   element "Software System" {
      background #1168bd
      color #ffffff
  }
  element "Container" {
     background #438dd5
     color #ffffff
  }
}

[simonbrowndotje]

I am trying to mimic the old colouring mechanism (External elements are greyish, internal bluish) using group styles.

This isn't a part of the DSL ... are you referring to the C4-PlantUML export?

[toorog]

Yes I do. When replacing the deprecated enterprise element with group, external systems are not rendered greyish anymore. This is what I am trying to fix.

[simonbrowndotje]

You have a few options:

1. Fork the C4-PlantUML exporter, and override the writeElement method to use the _Ext version of elements when a specific tag or group is/is not present.
2. Just use the standard Structurizr approach to styling (https://github.com/structurizr/dsl/tree/master/docs/cookbook/element-styles) along with c4plantuml.tags true (https://github.com/structurizr/export/tree/main/src/main/java/com/structurizr/export/plantuml#c4plantumlexporter) in your DSL definition. For example:

workspace {

    model {
        softwareSystem "A"
        softwareSystem "B" {
            tags "External"
        }
    }

    views {
        properties {
            c4plantuml.tags true
        }
        
        systemLandscape {
            include *
            autolayout            
        }

        styles {
            element "Software System" {
                background blue
                color #ffffff
            }
            element "External" {
                background gray
                color #ffffff
            }
        }
    }
    
}

[toorog]

Thank you for answering. Does it mean elements can only be styled based on tags, but not based on the group they belong to?

[simonbrowndotje]

Correct, yes ... unless you fork the exporter, in which case you can do whatever you like.