REST API Flowchart with Swimlanes

restapiflowchart
Sep 14, 2021

Thoughts

In one of the upcoming meeting, I was required to showcase the flow of one of the API I had built. Of course, opening the IDE and walking through the code isn't a good an option, when the audience is not of active programmers.

So to present it visually, flowchart is the one that came to my mind first.
But as a programmer those swimlanes from the sequence diagram, which helps me separate different systems, were also poking my brain a lot.

So I decided to mix them.

Below is how a typical REST API flow will look when pictured using flowcharts with swimlanes:

REST API Flowchart with Swimlanes

Notice! how the client swimlane is showing all the possible response codes
I liked the outcome. So thought of taking a note to be referred to in future.

Bonus:

This diagram was created using draw.io software and you can find its source file here.

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