Messages

1

General Board / Re: Stupid yet Urgent Request

« on: March 10, 2004, 01:23:16 pm »

Thanks to all for your help. As it turned out, I mis-stated the problem a bit in my original post.

What I actually had was a deployment diagram. In other diagrams I had defined different classes of nodes and components.  In the deployment digram, I wanted to show a hypothetical deployment, with multiple instnaces of the different types of nodes and components. So this diagram had instances of nodes and instances of components.

Selected "change element" but it didn't seem to let me change instances of a node or component into new classes of nodes or components.

So I ended up just recreating the diagram. But thanks to all for your quick and timely replies!

2

General Board / Stupid yet Urgent Request

« on: March 09, 2004, 05:47:55 pm »

Hi. i have been working on a UML model for three days for an RFI that my team is working on. The marketing guys who are in charge of the RFI like the model and love the UML diagrams from EA.

BUT one of the diagrams is an object instance diagram. I.e., It shows a hypothetical instance of objects that the data model allows. The PROBLEM is that onject names are underlined. Apparently when the marketing guys copy my diagrams into their RFI (Copy Image to clib board then paste in word doc) the diagrams print out with the "underlines" looking more like "strike outs" (i.e. they are not underneath the words, they are through the middle).

SO they have asked me to "remove the underlines." Believe me, there is no way I can tell them "Objects in UML diagrams are SUPPOSED to be underlined". This is simply not an option.

So in the next 12 hours, I have to somehow get these underlines removed from my beautiful diagram. I cannot see a way to do this in EA.  Any suggestions?

The only thing I can see to do is to create "classes" out of all my "objects" so that EA will not underline their names. The problem with that is that I don't see anyway to convert an object into a class. So I'm forced to manually create a new class for each object instance on my diagram. Lotsa work there.

Any advice on this would be very much appreciated!!!

3

General Board / Re: UML Modeling Question

« on: April 08, 2002, 08:24:49 am »

Ann,

I'm a newbie to the world of UML, but I think you are correct.

My interpretation of the notion of a dependency relationship is that if one class might be affacted by changes in another class, the first class should be noted as a depend on the second.  

I think the idea is that these dependencies could then be used as part of a make process or build process to  identify which files need to be recompiled as part of a build.

In the Java world, it seems that there isn't quite as much need for this sort of stuff because the java compiler does a pretty good job of recompiling based on dependencies.  But I can imagine it would be useful.

4

General Board / Re: Sequence Notes Not Factoed Size of Diagram

« on: April 03, 2002, 07:26:58 pm »

Forgot to mention. I also tried the new menu item on the link context menu to attach notes to links. Worked like a charm for me.


Thanks, as usual!

5

General Board / Re: Sequence Notes Not Factoed Size of Diagram

« on: April 03, 2002, 07:24:14 pm »

I just tried out this feature in build 479. It has a couple of quirky behaviors, but you can definitely slide teh messages down and make room for the sequence notes. Thanks!  This really helps keep the documentation together with the diagram

When you drag a message down, you can't drag it below the next message underneath it or the editor will think you want to change the order of the messages. Also, it appears to me that as you slide  messages down such that the bottom message would slide off the end of the swim lanes, then the drag fails. No problem, you just go extend the swim lanes and drag it down again.  

6

General Board / Re: Sequence Notes Not Factoed Size of Diagram

« on: April 02, 2002, 05:18:29 am »

These changes sound great. I like the idea of a coment note on the context menu for a link.

7

General Board / Re: Sequence Notes Not Factoed Size of Diagram

« on: April 01, 2002, 07:08:23 am »

Hmmmm, I'll try it some more. Maybe te objects in he sequence diagrams were so close to each other that the interface just couldn't detect that I wanted to attach a note to a message.

8

General Board / Re: Sequence Notes Not Factoed Size of Diagram

« on: March 29, 2002, 05:39:15 am »

Being able to drag messages in a sequence diagram up or down would work for me. And I kinda like having fine grained control over their placement because it will also let me insert Note elements into the diagrams at certain places.

Two side issues while I'm at it:
1) The other day I inserted a Note element into a sequence diagram and then tried to create a Note link between the note and one of the messages. I got a message saying that this wasn't conformant to the UML spec. Bummer. It would let me attach the note to one of the objects/classes in the sequence, just not the message. Given that there is the "sequence note" feature on the messages, this is not a big deal. I was just curious about why UML had this restriction. I'm just barely starting to get a clue on how UML works so I'm trying understand things like this.

2) In the diagram properties, I like to check the "show diagram details" box so that the background of the diagram shows the diagram name, and last modification date. This helps me keep track when I copy diagram links to my design document. But on Sequence diagrams, the objects/classes at the top of the swim lanes overlap the diagram details. It would be nice if I could control how far from the top of the page the objects/classes start so that they don't overlap the details.  

I can sort of work around this problem. Instead of checking the "show diagram details" box on the diagram properties, I can insert a diagrm details note. This creates the same information that I drag around the diagram and place it someplace out of the way. The problem with this approach is that I've noticed that these diagram notes don't always get updated when something on the diagram gets updated. I haven't watched this closely enough to figure out exactly when it does and does not get updated.

9

General Board / Sequence Notes Not Factoed Size of Diagram

« on: March 28, 2002, 02:32:02 pm »

When composing a sequence diagram chart, I like to enter sequence notes for the messages that flow between the various objects. I like how they show up to the side of the diagram. However, if I enter a lot of notes, they are often truncated in the diagram. It would be nice if the sequence note box was made as big as it needs to be to show all the text in the note and all the other messages are shoved down to make room.

10

General Board / Re: Not all diagrams generated in Build 479

« on: April 03, 2002, 07:15:20 pm »

The work around to the problem you described seems to work just fine. I moved my sequence diagrams back under the use cases they blong to and when I followed your instructions, both the use case and the diagrams under showed up in the generated RTF just fine.

Thanks!

11

General Board / Re: Not all diagrams generated in Build 479

« on: April 03, 2002, 05:07:38 pm »

Some more info about my previous post.....

I moved the diagrams out from under the use case element so they are directly under the package and that seems to work ok in terms of generating the diagrams (but it's not how I'd like to organize them in my model).

On the panle for generating RTF doc, I saw a check box labeled "document all elements" which I thought might fix my problem because there was no doc generated for the use case elements either. But when I tried to generate the doc with that check box set, I got an error message "Join operation not supported" or something like that and then EA crashed.

I'm on buil 479

12

General Board / Not all diagrams generated in Build 479

« on: April 03, 2002, 04:59:29 pm »

Howdy,

In my Model, I have a series of packages under the use case view for the different categories of usage scenarios in my project. Under each if these packages I have a use case diagram and a bunch of use case elements.

Under each use case element, I have a sequence diagram that represents the implementation of that use case.

When I generate my RTF documentation, It generates a heading for the packages of use cases and it generates the use case diagram under each package. But the RTF docs don't put anything in for the individual use cases and they don't generate diagrams for the sequence diagrams I have under the use case elements.

Can anyone tell me if there are parameters that need to be tweaked to get these to show up in the RTF documentation?

13

General Board / Re: Need stable file names in generated RTF doc

« on: April 03, 2002, 04:54:35 pm »

Hey,

Just wanted to say thanks for putting stable file names in build 479! So far it seems to be working ok.

14

General Board / Re: Need stable file names in generated RTF doc

« on: March 26, 2002, 02:21:32 pm »

You da man! Thanks! And yes this will turn into a purchase of the full product. It's just a matter of waiting to see if I can get my boss to pay for it or not. :-)

15

General Board / Need stable file names in generated RTF doc

« on: March 26, 2002, 05:40:32 am »

Howdy,

The more I use EA the more I like it! But there's currently one annoyance in version 3.10 that I'm wondering if it's possible to fix. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong.
It has to do with generating pictures of the diagrams.

Here's what I currently do. I use the EA feature to generate RTF documentation for my entire project. This runs through and generates an RTF document with links to a bunch of images in the images directory. I call this doc EA.RTF.

But _my_ design is in a separate document, let's call it design.rtf.  So what I do is open both the EA.RTf and design.RTF. I go through the EA.rtf document select the diagrams, and do a copy-n-paste from the ea.rtf into design.rtf.  I copy-n-paste the diagrams as _links_ so that design.rtf is now dependent on the images files in the images directory.  

So far so good. If I update a diagram. I can regenerate the RTF doc, which regenerates ea.rtf and all the images. Because design.doc is linked to image files, it picks up the updates too. Run design.doc through acrobat and I have design.pdf and everything is groovy. :-)

But here's the problem. The image files are numbered, apparently sequentially based on the order they are generated. If you create a new diagram in your model, it affects the order that the diagrams are generated and thus the file names of the diagrams in the images directory. design.doc apparently does it's links strictly by file name and these links are not updated during the doc generation rocess. Therefore the links in design.doc now point to the wrong diagrams and I have to go through ea.rtf and recopy the links into design.doc again to get design.doc to point to the right diagrams.

What I need is for the name of the image file to be _fixed_ so that the diagram always produces the same image file name everytime I regenerate the documentation.

I can think of a couple of ways to fix this:
1) derive the image file name from the name of the diagram in the browser. The problem with this is that sometimes you like to change the name of a diagram and you;d have a similar roblem as described above.
2) Let the user specify the file name of the diagram in the properties dialog of the diagram. This is appealing , but means some extra work on the end user part and what happens if they don't specify a file name.
3) When a diagram is created, assign it some number that is unique to all diagrams in the model and ensure that this number never changes. It lasts as long as the diagram lasts. Use this number to generate the file name of the image that's generated.

I like option 3 the best, but I could live with 1 or 2 as well.

If someone knows a way to work around this problem using the existing builds, please let me know! Thanks.