BUG: Duplicate Names ?

[Hugo]

Hi

I'm new to this tool and have only spent a short time familiarising myself with it.

If I create a new empty project and select "Business Process" in the wizard, then when it has finished creating the project I see a folder view with a folder called "Business Process Model" and a diagram beneath that called "Business Process Model". If I click on that folder and add another diagram, an activity diagram, the ensuing dialog that prompts for a few details, defaults the name for the new diagram to "Business Process Model".

If I leave this and just select OK then I see two diagrams with the same name.

Suerly this is bad practice at best and a bug at worst?

Allowing multiple entities beneath a tree node, to have the same name surely serves no useful purpose?

Hugo

[«Midnight»]

Hugo,

That's a real can of worms to say the least. Depending on an individual developer's opinions and methodology this may be anything from a violation of correct behavior to a desirable feature.

EA uses a GUID to keep entities unique. Where UML forces unique names - which is less often than many users realize - EA can generally be made to obey the naming constraint. Make sure you turn the strict UML syntax option on in EA of course.

However, there is nothing in UML that forces diagrams to have unique names. In fact, the convention of having diagrams 'live' within packages is (to the best of my iknowledge) not required or recognized by UML. It is a handy feature, but not all tools handle things this way, and several other paradigms work pretty well.

All in all this is not too serious. It does require you to pay a bit of attention to what you're doing, but that's not such a bad thing.

Try looking into the ability of EA to add a diagram to an element. For example, you can add an Activity diagram to a use case. You can also accomplish much the same result by marking an element as composite. Both of these features are available through the context menu of an element. The new diagram defaults to the element name, but lives at the next lower level in the project tree. Perhaps this will provide a structure that will help you resolve the apparent namespace issue.

HTH, David