Interaction

Description

You can use an Interaction element to insert an Interaction diagram as a child of a Class element. The Interaction element can contain a diagram of any of these types:

Sequence
Communication
Timing

An Interaction element in Enterprise Architect is treated as a behavior of the classifier it is encapsulated within. It can have parameters and return types, which are modeled using the 'Behavior' tab of the Interaction element's 'Properties' dialog. The element is interpreted as a method of the containing Class in the generated code (see the Generate Code From Behavioral Model topic).

An Interaction element can also be set as the classifier for an Interaction Occurrence in a Sequence diagram, or for a Call Behavior Action in an Activity diagram. Establishing such an association (between a behavior and a behavior call) facilitates adding arguments that can be individually mapped to the associated behavior's parameters.

Notes

The behavioral code generation engine expects the Sequence diagram and all its associated Messages and Combined Fragments to be encapsulated within an Interaction element (such as setupUSB in this example)

(The IO Class is available in the EAExample model, under Systems Engineering Model | Implementation Model | Software)
The Interaction icon is listed on the Additional page of the Interaction Toolbox, but should only be added to elements through the element context menu on the diagram or in the Project Browser

Toolbox icon

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