Actor too big and removal of duplicate elements

[Fabio Franco]

Hi, I've a couple of actors in the design of an application. They are grouped inside "Actors" of use case model. The problem is that 2 of the actors are huge when dropped on a diagram, the others are fine.

I don't know why these actors are sou out of scale compared with the rest of the diagram, I'm just getting sick of resizing them all the time.

Is there a way to fix this, without recreating the actors and therefore not breaking the current diagrams that they are being used?

One second question that would help solving the first one is:

Is there a way to replace a diagram element with another without actually braking the diagrams? Some way to "update the reference" to point to the new element. That would specially useful when there are duplicate elements used in several diagrams that were created more than once by mistake.

Thanks for the help.
Regards,

Fábio

PS: I use EA 8.0.855

[KP]

In EA 8, the first time you dropped an element on a diagram, that diagram object would be used as the appearance template for all subsequent times you dropped it on a diagram - find the first diagram object and you can change its appearance (Ctrl+U should help). This behaviour appears to have been changed in EA 9, it's no longer a problem.

[Fabio Franco]

Thanks, that works, anything about my second question?

Regards,
Fábio

[Geert Bellekens]

Fabio,

AFAIK that can only be done using the API.
You would have to check all elements that depend on the element you are trying to replace such as
- relations
- diagrams
- attributes using it as type
- parameters using it as type

In each of those you have to replace the reference to the element with the new element.

And of course you have to move all owned elements and features to the new element.

Geert

[Fabio Franco]

Thanks Geert, I guess this is more work than it's worth and I don't know the APIs for EA anyway. I think the best approach to this case is to refactor everything.

Thanks again