Diagram Refactorings (Extract)

[fperedo]

Hi!
Nowdays is very common to have refactoring functionality in the IDE, a refactoring I find particularly useful is "extract method", (http://www.refactoring.com/catalog/extractMethod.html)

I would love to have similar functionality in Activity Diagrams or State Diagrams, so that I could select a subset of the elements of the diagram, and click on "extract diagram", the EA would replace the elements of a the actitiy diagram with a composite element and automatically create a composite element with an internal activity diagram with all the elements that were previously in the main diagram.

Mmmm... it could also be used in Sequence & Communication diagrams!!! (And we could also have an "inline diagram" that could do the opposite thing... )

Other refactorings that would be nice to have could be:
-Extract Superclass (for Class Diagram)
-Extract Interface (for Class Diagram)
- Pull Up Field (for Class Diagram)
- Pull Up Method (for Class Diagram)
- Extract Class (for Class Diagram)

In fact it would be great if EA could have "diagram equivalents" for all the refactorings in http://www.refactoring.com/catalog/index.html, that would eliminate a lot of "grunt work"...

What do you think?  

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Good idea, but I suspect not sometime soon...

I think there might be issues with EA's internal metamodel that would preclude some of these features, but...

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Paolo

[edcwhite]

What you said is EXACTLY what we need.   It frustrates me to no end that it is easier to refactor code than a design.  Short of what you ask how about just the ability to select a portion of a sequence diagram (including messages!) and then manually copy and paste it into a new diagram.  I would happily create the links!  The problem is you CANNOT copy messages in a sequence diagram so when I spot a portion of the diagram I would like to extract I am forced to recreate much of it.