Arrows in communication diagrams

[willdarby]

We use communication diagrams with links to components. We have found in many cases that the arrows associated with collaborations between the elements are removed from the diagram after edits are made. We don't have a specific repeatable scenario.

Advice or work arounds would be greatly appreciated.

[Piet1956]

We have the same problem now with EA version 7.5 build 845
Did you ever find a cause / solution for this issue?

Thanks,
Piet

[willdarby]

We did not find a solution, and it has caused significant problems for our design effort.

Our project isstructured as follows: SQL Server DB for model storage with source control locking for access control. The latter has caused us significant issues. The XMI serialization/deserialization, required for source control based locking, does not work well, and has caused other model corrupts. I am speculating that this may be part of our problem. We are going to start using the integrated locking soon.

I would be interested if you have a similar configuration.

[Geert Bellekens]

Do you mean that you loose only the navigability indicator (arrowhead) on the relations, or is the whole relation gone?
Is this only on the communication diagrams, or do you have a similar problem with other types of diagrams?

Geert

[Piet1956]

We use EA in a collaborative environment on windows server 2003 platform. Multiple users work with the same eap file. We use cvs for version control. Each user has his own cvs working directory. I sent a report also to Sparx systems and hope they will come with a solution, but for now it causes a lot of problems and rework.

The arrows of the messages defined on the associations between two objects in the communication diagram disappear, while the message names are still there. This is true for some associations on the diagram, but not for all of them. Other messages keep their arrows. Normally when you move a message name on the diagram relative to the association line, a dashed line appears between the message and the association line, to indicate the connection between them. For the messages without arrows this dashed line has also disappeared, but when moving the association line, the message moves still with it, so the link between association and message is still there.
It seems either arrows of all messages on an assocation disappear or they all stay.
There might be a relation between changing the object on one side of the association (i.e. redirecting the association from one object to another), but I'm not sure about that. The problem does not appear immediately after this move, but when checking the package out again at some later time.

[Geert Bellekens]

Sounds like a (part of) the relation is not properly exported to xmi.
I can imagine that this part of the relation is not moved when the relation to redirected to another object.
Could it be that the association is moved to the other object, but the message is not?
If the two objects between which you have moved the relation are in seperate packages (xmi files) then I can image that the message is lost when importing the xmi file.
I think you definitely need Sparx's help with that.
Try to provide them with a repeatable case. Once they can repeat the bug they will probably provide a fix within a couple of weeks.

Geert

[Piet1956]

If we do an xmi export of the packages and from those files do an xmi import into a new model, the arrows are back again. It seems that all the information was still in the .eap file (because it was used for the export), but for some reason was not shown.

I tried to reproduce the error on a small example, but did not succeed. It could be that the co-operation of several people on the same .eap is of influence.