Hi Farfetch; Hi Yo.
Please tell me if I'm missing something here, but my understanding is that what Yo wants to do is to join a note to another diagram element, and he wants to use a dotted or dashed line. I assume he tried to use one of the dotted lines from the Analysis, Use Case, Logical... tool boxes, and EA did not permit him to do this. The reason for this stricture is that in UML it is not logical to use flows, realizations, etc. in order to link notes to other elements. For instance, just what is going to flow between the note and an activity, or between a note and an object? Just imagine having either a CASE tool or a human developer having to figure out what that flow means in terms of generating code!
My recommendation was to use a note link (which is a dashed line, and would satisfy Yo's request). These lines are the valid UML artifact for what Yo wants to do. Also, I have succesfully used these note links to join notes to classes, use cases, nodes, activities... and so forth, and have found no bugs or problems in EA.
As Farfetch points out, there is an exception to the rule that only note links can join notes to other elements; namely, that you can join notes to elements with a dependency. You have to be careful, though, because the use of these dependencies have to be logical, otherwise it will not be clear what aspect of the note it is that the element is dependent on. To give you a valid example: In Ericksson-Penker extensions, you have notes that are stereotyped to <<Business rule>> and <<Problem>>. You can readily see that it makes perfect sense to join a <<Business rule>> to a class or to an activity with a dependency link; or to join a <<Goal>> object to a <<Problem>> also through a depedency.
I hope this helps to clarify the issue.
Jaime Gonzalez
