SysML Activity Diagram - Q: How to hide the block names in the action bubbles

[avi10000]

Hi,
When I create an activity, all the actions of the activity diagram appear with two texts in its bubble: an action name at the top, and the name of the owning block at the bottom.
e.g.,
      |------------------------------------|
      |           Process - Step 1    |
      |            Subsystem 1::      |
      |------------------------------------|

Usually, I do not want the owning block name to appear. How do I hide it? The appearance of the owning block name makes the action bubble too big and hence the diagram way larger than it needs to be.

More info:
The way I create actions on the activity diagram is as follows:
For the owning block:
(1)   I create one operation for each action that I want to appear on the activity diagram.
(2)   I drag each of the operations onto the activity diagram canvas. For each operation, a corresponding action bubble appears, whose name is the same as that of the operation.

EA versions: EA ver 15.1 and more recently v16 Eval Edition

Diagrams:
BDD Diagram with Project Browser:



Act Diagram:



Thanks
Avi

[avi10000]

I see my two diagrams do not appear. I do not know why not. Anybody?

Anyway, I hope the question is clear without the diagrams.

[avi10000]

I wrote the addresses of the two diagrams as follows:
  - BDD Diagram and Project Browser:
         [i-m-g]https://ibb.co/FB8yvM8[/i-m-g]

  - Act Diagram:
         [i-m-g]https://ibb.co/Hx55BYP[/i-m-g]

(where i-m-g is img)

[Geert Bellekens]

Diagram properties: disable fully scoped object names.

Geert

[avi10000]

Thank you.

Does not work.

[avi10000]

Is there anything else that works?

[PeterHeintz]

It might be that your actions do have the wrong parent.
The parent of actions should be its owning action not a block.

[avi10000]

Edited at 2022-09(Sep)-22 - 12:46. Edits indicated by blue font.

Hi Peter -- Thank you for your quick response.

> It might be that your actions do have the wrong parent.
> The parent of actions should be its owning action not a block.

1. What I see in EA is that the parent of the actions is the activity diagram
(unless there is a partition, or a structured activity, or similar -- where in those cases that element is the parent of the enclosed actions).

2. What I see in EA is that the block is the highest level owner of the operations -- i.e., as a static block declaration, which contains static operation declarations.
 
I then create the actions by dragging each operation onto the activity diagram canvas, which then appears as an action. The action that is created from an operation is given the same name as the operation from which it was "born".

This does seem to me the integrated way (and MBSE way) of creating actions. An alternative way of creating actions that avoids the additional text name problem -- is to drag actions from the Toolbox to the activity diagram canvas. But that seems to me to be a totally wrong methodology since we have a static/object model (BBDs) and the activities (dynamic/behavior model) should be integrated with the object model. If I were to simply drag actions from the Toolbox then that would be like using EA as a simple drawing tool like Visio.

Notes:

 - I don't think I have told all you guys something you don't already know...

 - If I could send a diagram I would send a diagram...

Thanks
Avi

[avi10000]

Ok, the following two diagrams should be accessible by clicking the links:

BDD Diagram and Project Browser + Features Window:
https://ibb.co/Wkz7MVN

Activity Diagram:
https://ibb.co/g9YC9pk

The first diagram shows the Subsystem 1 block, and that the block contains ("owns") the operations (remember - each action is derived from an operation of the same name).

The second diagram shows the Process Audio Inputs activity diagram, with its actions; and that all the actions show also the block name, which is the immediate parent of the original operations.

[avi10000]

There are times when you might want to show the block owner name in the action bubbles: and that is when actions* are owned by more than one block.

However, if you really want to show the block name inside the action bubbles, a better way is usually/probably to present the block owners as partitions within the activity diagram, which a nice feature. And when you do that , then the appearance of block names within the action bubble becomes totally super-redundant superfluous and so makes your diagram look buggy and really amateurish. 

(*and the corresponding operations, where each action is derived from its corresponding operation.)

[avi10000]

 I don't want to believe that EA has reached version 16 and it still cannot let you draw basic activity diagrams. So somebody please show me the solution.
When I compare this thread of mine with so many other threads on this EA forum that are very complex, this thread seems just dumb. This thread is worth just two sentences. Why is it so hard to get a solution?

[Geert Bellekens]

Look like a bug when creating the action the "short" way.

If I create a callOperationAction the regular way (with the toolbox), and then select the operation, I get

ActionName
(Owner::OperationName)

Which is correct.

When however I drag OperationName from the project browser onto the diagram, I still get a callOperationAction with the correct name and correct link to the operation, but this time it shows on the daigram as

ActionName
(Owner:

Selecting another operation from the behavior tab seems to clear the wrong behavior.

Worth a bug report I think.

Geert

[avi10000]

Hi Geert ,
Thank you for the response. Had to take a break, I am now studying it.
Will get back to the forum soon, PG.
 - Avi

[Takeshi K]

Hi all,

About the drawing for Call Operation Actions, if I understand correctly, I am sure that current drawing by Enterprise Architect is correct and is also completely satisfied by the UML 2.5 specification.
Please see the Figure 16.17 in the specification document and its description above the figure. This is not a bug.

HTH,

[avi10000]

Edited: Added/changed text shown in blue colored font

Hi Takeshi K,
Thank you for drawing attention to the UML spec (2.5.1) diagrams 16.16 to 16.17 left and right.

I want my actions to look as in figure 16.16, i.e., the action contains just one text line.

(And I do not care whether it is operation name - or the action name, because I name them the same anyway.)

I.e. I want to hide the lower text line. But so far I cannot find a way to make EA hide it.

This is a show stopper for me.

But I do not think I am getting my message across...

I will try to explain again. At my company, a major occupation during the last year has been to draw activity diagrams to describe our massive and complex system.

The engineers are used to doing their diagrams in Visio. Each of their bubbles (~=actions, in UML/SysML) has just one name text line (naturally...).  So if my EA diagrams have two lines per action then my EA diagrams come out physically twice as large as their Visio diagrams.

For MBSE to be "adopted" at my company, I must be able to show the managers that (in addition to MBSE's modeling capabilities) MBSE must also always generate diagrams at least as good as Visio diagrams in every way.

However, so far, EA produces activity diagrams worse than Visio. [/i]

So I need to hide the extra line in the EA action bubbles.

If EA cannot do that then I will have to start testing different MBSE platforms (tools). E.g., Papyrus.

With prayerful wishes that I have now managed to explain my needs,

Thanks all and have a good day.

(It's soon holiday where I am, so going offline and will be back online only from tomorrow evening.)