Messages

1

General Board / Re: Communication between concurrent states

« on: June 30, 2016, 08:46:48 pm »

It's a shame. EA state machines are so close, frustratingly so, but no banana. May have to recommend the company ditch EA in favour of Simulink/Stateflow. Sparx really needs to brush up its EA documentation IMO. Intra-state machine communication (concurrent states) info is just none existent. Somehow you have to try to cobble it together out of activity references, triggers and signals. Stateflow is intuitive and works in this respect. Perhaps Sparx's goal was just to meet the UML spec, but that certainly is not enough for formal and functional state machines and inter communication 

2

General Board / Re: Communication between concurrent states

« on: June 30, 2016, 07:35:13 pm »

Have picked up some info from the example model :
Project Model.Model Simulation.State Machine Models.Music Player.MusicPlayer

The model however is woefully under documented. Barely a single description/note field filled out if any

The model does show event reception using triggers and signals but I don't see any examples of events being sent by the example model so far 

3

General Board / Communication between concurrent states

« on: June 28, 2016, 11:26:36 pm »

Hi all,

Just wondering if anyone can help on a matter of communication between concurrent states. I have a state machine with 2 composite concurrent states that I wish to signal between. In my days using Simulink/Stateflow I would simply create an event and refer to it from the sending concurrent state in an action expression and refer to it from the receiving concurrent state in a trigger expression. How do I achieve this in EA? I can create a trigger event easily enough in the recipient transition but I don't know how to send the event from a transition action. The options I seem to have is to select a behaviour, which seems to only allow me to select activities or I can type the name of the trigger event into the transition effect text box, but this seems like purely a text exercise without any connection to an actual event in the model. Am I expecting too much from EA?

TIA
Ian

4

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Suggestion: 1..* (for existing elements) quick linking

« on: May 27, 2016, 09:50:12 pm »

Suggested mechanism:

Open a diagram with an existing set of elements that we want to create relationships for.

Select the set of elements that we want connected to a single element, right click for context menu, select 'Link To...' (just invented that). Then select the target element(s) that they all link to. Pop up dialog asks for the type of link (a list of recently used, preferred or most common perhaps (with respect to type, directionality, cardinality, stereotype etc):

Result (had to use an image from the net so look at the middle rows):

5

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Suggestion: Multiple instances of project browser

« on: May 27, 2016, 09:13:53 pm »

The Package Browser window is my preferred way. It allows elements to be dragged both to and from the Project Browser to change the package.

This solves the problem as far as I am concerned 

The help could probably do with a section on organisation and maintenance of the model that includes such ideas.

6

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Suggestion: Multiple instances of project browser

« on: May 24, 2016, 09:46:17 pm »

It would be interesting to hear from the developers whether this really is such a difficult functionality to implement. I find it hard to believe personally speaking, especially if the multiple were limited to 2, which is probably all that is required.

7

Suggestions and Requests / Suggestion: 1..* (for existing elements) quick linking

« on: May 20, 2016, 08:49:44 pm »

(Possibility of similar or same suggestion already existing accepted. Apologies in advance for duplicate suggestions and existing capabilities that already cover the suggestion.)

Suggest allowing 1 to many quick linking between existing elements, while allowing the user to select the directionality and stereotype of the links as same for all or specify each. I believe this would improve user productivity. Very useful for block diagrams of various sorts including class diagrams.

8

Suggestions and Requests / Suggestion: Multiple instances of project browser

« on: May 20, 2016, 08:41:08 pm »

(Possibility of similar or same suggestion already existing accepted. Apologies in advance for duplicate suggestions and existing capabilities that already cover the suggestion.)

Suggest allowing more than one instance of the project browser to make reorganizing models easier. Dragging elements from one part of a model to another, though not impossible, can be tricky. Having 2 instances of browser open would allow the user to see the source and destination on screen(s) simultaneously, reducing the probability of losing the destination package or mistaking with a similarly named package.