I've been playing with MDG Technologies over the last month or so and found a number of inconsistencies that REALLY get in the way of being able to create a useful technology that is able to provide the same kind of rendering that one can provide without using MDG Technologies. I've developed a proposal to resolve these inconsistencies. Because of the wide ranging nature of the proposal (and because different portions can be enacted without the whole being completed, I've split it into a number of separate topics, each dealing with a different aspect of the proposal. This topic deals with the proposal as a whole, in summary.
If you want to
support the proposal in its entirety for this, submit a
Feature Request with the same name (
Consistent Diagram Item rendering proposal),
leaving a note
here to say you've done it
- so we users have an indication of the level of support.[/color]
The proposal has a number of principles to which it attempts to adhere:
- Whatever rendering you can perform manually, you should also be able to do on a per-stereotype basis.
- Shape scripts should override and supersede the Stereotype "Default".
- MDG Technologies should not be less functional than the alternatives
- The order of rendering application should be: Instance Default, Stereotype (whether Global, Profile or MDG) Default, Item Default Appearance, Item Diagram Appearance
This latter principle, (in build 855) is currently violated - see:
Consistent application of "Default" itemThe user manually can affect the rendering of an item's:
- Fill colour
- Border Colour
- Border Width
- Font (including some font attributes - such as name, size, bold, italic, underline etc)
- Font Colour
This can be done via the Format Tool (
View|Toolbars>Format Tool.
In addition, the user can request an alternate image be displayed. In this case, EA will add the item name and the item stereotype under the image. As one would expect, having set an alternate image, you can no longer affect the fill or border colour (since they - conceptually - don't exist any more. However, the font does exist, and so you'd
expect to be able to set the various font attributes in the same way as without the alternate image. That (currently - build 855) is not the case and is the subject of a separate bug report:
Alternate Image - Font Colour not supported. I commend your support for the fixing of this defect.
OK, so we've now defined the scope of what I'm going to discuss.
As you can see, the first thing this proposal needs to address is: the inconsistency between font specification in rectangular and alternate image modes.
The next is to acknowledge that since one can change the 5 aspects of the item manually, we should be able to set a Default Appearance for the same 5 aspects (See
Allow all 5 aspects to be set via Default Appearance [F4])
Now we have repaired the item Default Appearance for unstereotyped items, we need to be able to do the same thing for stereotyped items. We need a consistent mechanism for correctly applying rendering to Global Stereotypes (those defined in the
Settings|Uml...|Stereotypes dialog). (See:
Consistent appearance override for stereotypes)
Finally, having created a consistent mechanism for Global Stereotypes, we need to create a mechanism to consistently define and apply the equivalent renderings via MDG or Profile related stereotypes. At present (build 855) - setting the
Appearance>Default Appearance... [F4] of the Stereotype in the Profile Diagram will cause the element dragged off the toolbar to have its default setting set to the defined value - See:
Re: Alternate image in MDG (section on Default Appearance). The purpose of this is unclear to me since I thought that the
purpose of the appearance setting of the stereotype was to NOT set the Default Appearance, but to set it programmatically via the stereotype appearance functionality.
{End of Part 1}
