Stupid yet Urgent Request

[cspowers]

Hi. i have been working on a UML model for three days for an RFI that my team is working on. The marketing guys who are in charge of the RFI like the model and love the UML diagrams from EA.

BUT one of the diagrams is an object instance diagram. I.e., It shows a hypothetical instance of objects that the data model allows. The PROBLEM is that onject names are underlined. Apparently when the marketing guys copy my diagrams into their RFI (Copy Image to clib board then paste in word doc) the diagrams print out with the "underlines" looking more like "strike outs" (i.e. they are not underneath the words, they are through the middle).

SO they have asked me to "remove the underlines." Believe me, there is no way I can tell them "Objects in UML diagrams are SUPPOSED to be underlined". This is simply not an option.

So in the next 12 hours, I have to somehow get these underlines removed from my beautiful diagram. I cannot see a way to do this in EA.  Any suggestions?

The only thing I can see to do is to create "classes" out of all my "objects" so that EA will not underline their names. The problem with that is that I don't see anyway to convert an object into a class. So I'm forced to manually create a new class for each object instance on my diagram. Lotsa work there.

Any advice on this would be very much appreciated!!!

[Bruno.Cossi]

Hi,

there is a relatively easy way to change your Objects into Classes. Just select the Object in the diagram and then go to menu Element > Change Type. In the dropdownlistbox select "Class", that should do the trick.
If you have many Objects to change, you may want to make the changes directly in the database or in the EAP file (MS Access file with changed extension).

Hope this helps!

Bruno

[Rob_M]

Converting objects into classes is not likely going to solve the problem since you can have multiple instances of a class (i.e. objects) on the same diagram, but you cannot have a diagram that contains two references to the same class.

I recall a while ago a problem with object instances and underlines and I think it was fixed with an updated build. Make sure you have the most recent.

Rob_M

[Bruno.Cossi]

Rob,

I am sure there is a way to get rid of the underlines, but I can't recall what it was.
However, in the EA, even if a diagram contains several objects that are all instances of the same class, if you change them from Objects to Classes (using menu Element > Change type), it will work.

Bruno

[cspowers]

Thanks to all for your help. As it turned out, I mis-stated the problem a bit in my original post.

What I actually had was a deployment diagram. In other diagrams I had defined different classes of nodes and components.  In the deployment digram, I wanted to show a hypothetical deployment, with multiple instnaces of the different types of nodes and components. So this diagram had instances of nodes and instances of components.

Selected "change element" but it didn't seem to let me change instances of a node or component into new classes of nodes or components.

So I ended up just recreating the diagram. But thanks to all for your quick and timely replies!