Sparx Systems Forum

Enterprise Architect => Suggestions and Requests => Topic started by: wikitect on September 11, 2009, 08:49:44 pm

Title: Consistent Rendering of Text for Classes etc.
Post by: wikitect on September 11, 2009, 08:49:44 pm

EA seems to be inconsistent in how it renders text for elements:-

<<thing>>
Class Name

seems to be OK but for activities we get

<<activity>>
My Activity

and for documents

<<Artifact>>
My Artifact

This is all very inconsistent wrt presentation.

At the very least it'd be nice to be able to independently select the stereotype and name elements and to be able to set a default appearance for these.

<<stereotype>>
Name

Title: Re: Consistent Rendering of Text for Classes etc.
Post by: «Midnight» on September 11, 2009, 09:17:26 pm

This is pretty much dictated by the UML specification, not EA.

Title: Re: Consistent Rendering of Text for Classes etc.
Post by: wikitect on September 11, 2009, 09:52:03 pm

I had a quick look at the UML 2 spec and format doesn't seem to be mandated. There are lots of examples which use

<<stereotype>>
Name

but when you read the words it's pretty loose about how text is rendered.

Title: Re: Consistent Rendering of Text for Classes etc.
Post by: Geert Bellekens on September 14, 2009, 03:51:00 pm

There are some (not many) guidelines about the formatting of text in UML. (search for "Style Guidelines")
Italic and Underline have their own specific meaning (abstract and static).
For classifiers we can find following in the UML specs:

Code: [Select]

• Attribute names typically begin with a lowercase letter. Multi-word names are often formed by concatenating the words
and using lowercase for all letters except for upcasing the first letter of each word but the first.
• Center the name of the classifier in boldface.
• Center keyword (including stereotype names) in plain face within guillemets above the classifier name.
• For those languages that distinguish between uppercase and lowercase characters, capitalize names (i.e, begin them
with an uppercase character).
• Left justify attributes and operations in plain face.
• Begin attribute and operation names with a lowercase letter.
• Show full attributes and operations when needed and suppress them in other contexts or references.So yes, the name of a classifier should be bold and the stereotype should be plain.
On the other hand, the specification seems to contradict itself when it comes to activities. Most activities and actions in the examples have a plain text name, not a bold name. (but the stereotype is never bold)
The Artifact in the specifications follows the same rules as the Classifier it inherits from, plain stereotype and bold name.
I think this should count as a legit bug and should be reported as such to Sparx.

Geert

Title: Re: Consistent Rendering of Text for Classes etc.
Post by: Paolo F Cantoni on September 14, 2009, 05:04:11 pm

It is better to be consistently wrong than inconsistently wrong...  ;)

Paolo