Send self-message to myself

[gh]

Hi, is it possible to do something like this in EA? ( Note: If anyone wonders, this is just a pixel mockup )



I'd like to use this to show that I send a message to myself. Is there in general a better way to show this in UML?

[thomaskilian]

There is a standard self-message which is UML compliant. See the help on how to create it (drag away from the quicklink and drop on the object itself).

[gh]

I tried the self message - through the Toolbox and by drawing the message as you described - but what I wanted to achieve is to show that the activation of the object is stopped after the message is "delayed" in the message queue of the object.

[thomaskilian]

But that would mean another instance, which I would expect to appear on another life line.

[gh]

That's exactly what I don't want to be forced to.

Let's assume I have a diagram which shows the message flow between various tasks. It is true that every task has its message box etc. but that should be left out for now as the diagram is supposed to highlight the messages being sent between the entities within the various tasks. For this I'd like to show a self message (asynchronous, eventually with timing constraints) which is sent from the object and handled "after some time" from the same one.

[thomaskilian]

I see your point. I'm not sure whether this is UML compliant at all. And - most important - I don't see a way to achieve that with EA :-/

[sargasso]

Model the queue.

Update
(Now that I have more than 2 seconds to spare, I'll explain.)

If your object is truly asynchronous wrt enqueing/dequeing messages, then the easiest way to show this is to include the queue itself as an object in the diagram.  Then "putQ" and "getQ" can be shown as completely different interactions.

IAF, enqueing and dequeing are more "assymtotic" than asychronous.

hth
bruce