Business actor in EA 7.0

[biske]

I can't find business actor in Enterprise Architect 7.0. Does it exists or not? I learn book "UML for Database Design" and there is a business actor. Where I wrong?

[«Midnight»]

For a while I could just type it into the stereotype field of an actor. EA seemed to handle it just fine from there. I've not tried it for some time though; certainly since 7.1 and perhaps not since 7.0 came out.

[biske]

I didn't understood well what you said. My english is not so good. I understood that I can do it with stereotype. Does version 7.5 has business actors?

[«Midnight»]

What I meant was that although Business Actor did not appear in the stereotype drop-down list, I could simply type it in by hand. EA seemed to recognize it and handle it appropriately. This worked for some business-related stereotypes, but it has been long enough that I cannot remember if Business Actor was among them.

Note that the stereotype is case sensitive. You will have to play around to figure out if either or both capital letters are correct.

Also note that I have not tried this for a long time; it might not work now, if it ever did.

[biske]

I made stereotype "business actor" and it's now ok. Also I made stereotype "business use case" for use case.
Thanks a lot.

[RoyC]

In EA 7.0 we introduced the UML Dictionary as a step in restructuring the element descriptions.

If you look in the Help, find the UML Dictionary as a main topic, and then look under UML Elements > Inbuilt and Extended Stereotypes > Business Modeling Stereotypes you will see a page that describes stereotyped elements for business modeling, including Business Actor and Business Use Case, for both Class-type diagrams and Sequence-type diagrams.

In EA 7.5, these stereotyped business modeling elements were gathered into the Business Modeling toolbox page, where they can be used in Business Modeling and Business Interaction diagrams.

[biske]

Where I can find material to learn when to use actor when to use business actor.

[«Midnight»]

There is almost nothing in the EA documentation. What little there is can be found from EA help index via Business Modeling Diagram | Elements and Connectors.

AFAIK this stereotype comes from (or was at least heavily championed by) the Rational Unified Process (RUP). You can find a lot of documentation on the Web or in a good library. A good first resource might be to look at the IBM documentation inventory on the Web. [IBM now owns Rational.] You'll find lots of high-level references, including several from IBM, if you do a search for the phrase business actor. You should find good starting points on the first page of results.

David