How to create a state diagram in doxygen?

Question

Using doxygen I would like to produce state diagrams somehow. Are there any tricks in doxygen to help us achieve that?

Currently I am just using the pre-formatted text and then adding my own "free-text-diagram" which is hard to maintain and time-consuming to draw out.

I use all of the other diagrams produced by doxygen (i.e. inheritance, relations, etc...) but since state machines are not a "standard" c/c++ construct (i.e. eech designer can implemente them differently) I guess there is no automatic way to tell doxygen to do this for you. But is there some sort of creation of diagram elements that you can comment in next to each state? Maybe somthing like this crude example:

\section state Diagram
... description

\state state1...
\value1 returns state2
\value2 returns state1
int myState1Handler(){...}

\state state2...
\value1 returns state1
\value2 returns state2
int myState2Handler(){...}

EDIT 1:

Or, is it possible to use the graphviz markup language as suggested in the comments below and integrate them with the doxygen output somehow?

Answer 1

Doxygen (at least the latest version) provides the \dotfile and \dot special commands to insert arbitrary .dot files or inline dot graph descriptions to be rendered with graphviz to the generated documentation.

You might also consider to manage your state machines (by modelling, visual representation and code generation) using a tool like e.g. SMC.