Sparx Systems Forum
Enterprise Architect => Suggestions and Requests => Topic started by: Paolo F Cantoni on January 10, 2022, 04:57:23 pm
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Many of our items (especially those in our ontological models) have lengthy definitions and/or descriptions (sometimes many hundreds to - occasionally - thousands of characters) in the Notes field. We developed a mechanism to allow us to break these notes into separate portions. We created a "widget" (in this case the string "<--+-->"). By convention, text before the widget is the normative definition of the item (the notional "25 words or less"), whereas text following the widget is used for discursive narrative providing more detail about the item, its usage etc. We have a script to set the length of the visible notes to the start of the widget. Thus we only provide the full notes on the appropriate diagrams and no or minimal notes on the majority of diagrams.
The problem is that the script does such a good job of hiding the (larger) detail that often users aren't aware of "but wait, there's more!". We feel it would be most useful to provide an ellipsis character at the end of the shortened note display to indicate that there is more text but it is not visible. The use case I have outlined is our specific usage, but the use of the ellipsis to indicate a shortened note is of general applicability.
Thoughts?
Report,
Paolo
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hhhmmmm... why not use Notes for the short description and tagged values for the long semantic description?
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I think the ellipsis is generally a good idea. The question would be IF and HOW it would be implemented.
TVs are for stereotyped elements (that's why they are stereotype properties!) and have a sematic that should be different from a normative description (for which purpose you have the notes).
q.
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hhhmmmm... why not use Notes for the short description and tagged values for the long semantic description?
Because we want to see them in the same compartment. Also, why bother allowing a max length for Notes in the UI? If you don't show the full notes, for whatever reason, you should indicate so.
We take the view that we need to tell the user that the "picture" they are seeing may not be "the full story". For example, we automatically add a widget on a diagram if there are hidden relationships. For the present, if we have truncated notes, we add a widget indicating that the descriptions shown may not be "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". ;)
To paraphrase a famous quote: "There are lies, damned lies, and modelling diagrams" ;D
Paolo