Sequence Diagram

[Marli]

I've been usign EA for about a month now to build my UML diagrams and in general I am quite happy with this tool but I am a bit disappointed with the Sequence Diagram.
I expected more interation relations fragments for condition, try/catch, while, etc for building sequence diagram like and not like
Using this box fragment is almost impossible to build complex logic in the sequence diagram.
Is there any plan to improve the sequence diagram in a near future?

[Geert Bellekens]

What do you mean by improve?
I think it follows the OMG specifications pretty closely.


Geert

[philchudley]

Geert is right.

EA follows the OMG UML specification and try...catch combined fragments are not defined ... although some UML tools support them. Also remember that UML is intended to be independent of any development language

Just my opinion, but your example shown above is Java code in pictures, even down to the get set methods! If you are using sequence disgrams at this code level, you might as well right the code directly.

I feel sequence diagrams should be used as a blueprint to coding, modelling the interaction at an algorithmic level of abstraction, this is as the EA example you posted. The sequence diagram can then be used to drive the coding process.

At this level of abstraction, EA does a pretty code job of sequence diagrams.

Just my opinion

Cheers

Phil

[Marli]

If I have to draw a sequence diagram for this process:

Process a received Message:
Call a Class that convert the message to X
     If Converted  them call a class to Identify the Message
         if Concerted and identified call a Classe to Prioritize the message
            If all previous Process is sucessful
                Then send message to destination

And else and exception Handling has to be handle for each process. Each of this Class has many methods that is called before the process is done.

Is there a simple way to do that in EA?   :-/

Thanks, Marli

[Geert Bellekens]

Another thing is that you are trying to model the behavior of several different operations into one sequence diagram, which is the reason it becomes too complicated.
I believe that is not a best practice; see UML Best Practice: One Operation => One Sequence Diagram

Geert

[Marli]

I personally do no see the meaning of using Sequence Diagram for simple cases. The reason I have been usign this in the past is exactly to visualise grafically the complexy cases in the iteration between objects.