erdify 0.14.0 — ER diagrams for django-ninja schemas

[FabianClemenz]

erdify 0.14.0 is out 🎉

A small release with one new option that unblocks a whole framework.

--base-classes

erdify treats a class as a Pydantic model when BaseModel appears in its bases — and it resolves that chain only across the files it scanned. So a base class living in an installed package was unresolvable, and every subclass of it was silently skipped.

django-ninja is the case people hit. ninja.Schema does subclass pydantic.BaseModel, but that inheritance is inside the installed package, which erdify never reads:

from ninja import Schema

class AuthorOut(Schema):   # invisible before 0.14.0
    id: int
    name: str

Name the base and it works:

erdify ./api --base-classes Schema --infer-keys

[tool.erdify]
base_classes = ["Schema", "BaseSchema"]

This is deliberately config-driven rather than a hardcoded list of known third-party names, because the shared BaseSchema that every service imports from an internal company package is the same problem — and no fixed list could ever reach it. Both the bare (Schema) and qualified (ninja.Schema) forms match, and a class reaching the named base through an intermediate in a scanned file resolves too.

Scope, plainly: this covers ninja.Schema subclasses with explicit field annotations. It does not cover ninja.ModelSchema (or ninja_schema.ModelSchema), whose fields come from an inner Meta/Config rather than the class body — naming those bases would produce entities with no fields. That half is tracked in #171, and there is an open design question in it worth your opinion if you use those: is a response schema an entity, or just a projection of one?

A correction to the comparison page

The comparison page claimed no alternative ships Markdown injection or a CI drift gate. That was wrong: paracelsus ships both, plus Mermaid output and [tool.paracelsus] configuration. It is now a column in the table and a named entry under when to use something else — it reaches your models by importing them, so it sees resolved metadata an AST scan cannot, and for a single SQLAlchemy application that accuracy may well be worth more than erdify's independence.

An inaccurate comparison is worse than none. If you spot another, please open an issue.

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