Fuzzy Port selection

[thomaskilian]

Howdy,
I still can't believe that noone else has come over this. I have lots of components with even more ports and exposed interfaces. There are dependencies drawn between the exposed interfaces and for delegation also to ports. NOW: when I want to align ports/interfaces in the diagram I try to click the port. But in 90% of the case (or more!) I catch a connector nearby (or even far of). That would be a minor problem. BUT EA (as a quite recent IMPOVEMENT) changes the mouse pointer to become an up-left arrow AND move the target of the relation away from the port/interface to something around. You merely can't avoid that behavior. Especially at ports if you only click without moving the connector jumps from the port to component. As the move is only a few millimeters you oftern don't notice it. And later you wonder why your model is inconsistent. Bruce (is he on holiday) told me once that the only cure is to magnify to 1000% (or so). But that can't be it.

Sparxians: a longer time ago you introduced the Shift-click for connectors. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE! Let only the Shift-click move connectors. This up-left arrow is BIG BIG SCRAP!

Edit: Forgot to mention that autolayout for ports does not work at all. So I have to do it manually. This is a tedious work and with above behavior a real nightmare!

[«Midnight»]

Methinks you've a bug or two there Thomas.

The first (automatic move when selection is intended) sounds like an error in an earlier 'improvement' you cited. This could likely be repaired without too much confusion.

The second might or might not be a case of an unclear behavior definition.

Still, both worth reporting directly IMHO.

David

[thomaskilian]

David,
I already reported this as a bug. Here the response:

Hello Thomas

Dragging connector ends to other elements is not a bug, this is an added
feature for version 7.0.


Best Regards,
Nicholas Zounis
Sparx Systems Pty Ltd

To me this is error by design! I'm very unhappy with this [glb]improvement[/glb]

[«Midnight»]

I'd be happier if this were an improvement that was under the user's control. Thus my agreement about having it happen only when a different key combination is used.

Sigh...

[thomaskilian]

Just received a mail from Sparx support. They will include an option to toggle the behavior (in some future release) since they also had positive feedback regarding this functionality. So hope it still there

[«Midnight»]

Just received a mail from Sparx support. They will include an option to toggle the behavior (in some future release) since they also had positive feedback regarding this functionality. So hope it still there

Is that the same "future release" as BPEL, database ALTER statements, etc?

[thomaskilian]

Future will show us