Activity diagrams - modeling processes

[alfons12]

I was used to model processes using activity diagrams. I was using structured activities for the process steps which were specified in detail in a separate subprocess (another activity diagram). This allowed me to zoom in into details by clicking through the structured activities until I reached the lowest level of detail which included just actions.

Since version 14, it is not possible to create control flows between activities (https://www.sparxsystems.com/forums/smf/index.php/topic,39890.0.html) so I cannot use this approach.
Is there any solution for this? It is now hard to model processes without the possibility to navigate to the lower process level simply by clicking the upper process step.

Thank you

[Geert Bellekens]

The answer is in the same forum topic.

Drop your Activity on the diagram as an invocation.
You might need to set the composite diagram to be able to go to the diagram on double-click

Right Click | New Child Diagram | Select Composite Diagram

Geert

[alfons12]

Well, that's not good news  . That ruins my idea of using activity diagrams as a replacement for BPMN - it was straightforward to model flows of activities and business people are likely to refuse to learn how to "simulate" it with "invocations". It will not be intuitive for them anymore.

I'm not questioning the implementation in EA, if it's in the UML specification then ok, but why is it specified like this? It's natural for activities in the real life to come one after another which is how I was used to work with them 

[Geert Bellekens]

I wrote an article about this a while ago: https://bellekens.com/2012/12/09/uml-best-practice-there-are-no-activities-on-an-activity-diagram/

I think your idea is perfectly OK, you just have to use the proper syntax.

Geert

[alfons12]

This is spot on Geert! I had even encountered the exact need to use the same activity twice in the diagram so your example has clarified a lot of things to me. Thank you very much.

UML is really powerful, but there is definitely a business case for some tool which would allow just basic light-weight modeling and the tool would handle the UML complexity under the hood.

[Richard Freggi]

"UML is really powerful, but there is definitely a business case for some tool which would allow just basic light-weight modeling and the tool would handle the UML complexity under the hood."

If you learn to use sequence diagrams to model processes, you will find it much easier and even more powerful!
Activity diagrams have always been the problem child of UML, much has been written about this problem (see any good UML book).  The problem is that activity diagrams are structured flowcharts, not object oriented.  They are OK to document class operations basically.

Geert's web page is a good example (structured decomposition, not object-oriented) (no offense Geert!)