Dashed Line Styles on a Diagram Legend

[Barrie Treloar]

The Legend properties for lines does not appear to have any options for things like line style (dashed, etc) or arrows.

The only options are Fill Color, Line Color, Line (weight).

Is there something I have missed?

If I want to list these types of lines, what are my alternatives?

I'm probably looking at manually placing the things on the diagram and creating my own legend and using things like boundaries (with all parts set to the background color) to hide nodes used to display the connection line styles. Having tried this its a pain in the butt!

[Geert Bellekens]

The Legend properties for lines does not appear to have any options for things like line style (dashed, etc) or arrows.

The only options are Fill Color, Line Color, Line (weight).

Is there something I have missed?

If I want to list these types of lines, what are my alternatives?

I'm probably looking at manually placing the things on the diagram and creating my own legend and using things like boundaries (with all parts set to the background color) to hide nodes used to display the connection line styles. Having tried this its a pain in the butt!

I think you are better off creating an image of the legend you want to show and use that in the diagram.

EA is not a drawing tool.

Geert

[KP]

Dashed lines and arrowheads aren't "presentation options", they are language elements with specific fixed meaning. Your audience (presumably) know the language you are using but may not know what point you are emphasizing with your use of colour.

[skiwi]

EA is not a drawing tool.

I'm with Barry here, with whiteboard and handdrawn diagrams it is a diagramming tool.

[Eve]

EA is not a drawing tool.

EA is a modeling tool. The fact that it incorporates some drawing features doesn't change that. They are only there to help you highlight and clarify portions of your model.

[Geert Bellekens]

EA is not a drawing tool.

EA is a modeling tool. The fact that it incorporates some drawing features doesn't change that. They are only there to help you highlight and clarify portions of your model.

+1  :)

[AndyJ]

OK.

I'm creating a legend for a BPMN diagram model.

How do I, in the legend, explain the difference between the Sequence Flow and the Message Flow.

HINT: Message Flow is depicted with a dotted line, and different arrow heads.

How do I select/depict these things in the Diagram Legend?

Andy

[Geert Bellekens]

The idea is that you shouldn't. Those are inherent to the language you are using and are defined in the BPMN specifications.

That would be like including a dictionary reference for every word you use in a sentence.

But if you want to do it anyway you can use an image (or even better, use an existing image from the BPMN specs)

Geert

[skiwi]

EA is a modeling tool. The fact that it incorporates some drawing features doesn't change that. They are only there to help you highlight and clarify portions of your model.

And the purpose of a legend is to assist with the clarification of a diagram.

[skiwi]

The idea is that you shouldn't. Those are inherent to the language you are using and are defined in the BPMN specifications.

And the reality is that many consumers of model outputs, e.g. Solution Architecture Descriptions, would not know what UML was if it was running down their leg, let along what the connector conventions are.
Thus Andy's note about being able to depict these in a legend is correct.
Although perhaps rather than specifying dotted lines one could specify the connector types for lines and have them depicted correctly (with arrow heads as well).

I also note however that boundaries can have various different lines, and this is useful. Again being able to describe these in a legend seems like a no brainer.

[qwerty]

Superstructures 2.5 has made some steps in direction of formalizing diagrams. Legends, unfortunately, are not part of the specification. Since Sparx is OMG sponsor I recommend to extend specification in that direction and implement it ahead of their competitors.

q.

[Barrie Treloar]

The responses here pretty much summarize my problem.

We attach a Legend to diagrams to remind people what the symbols mean, as UML and BPMN are not as well known (or understood) as modeling authors would like.

With the Legend most people would be able to grok the diagram without having to resort to reading modeling notation specifications (which are often impenetrable barriers of text).

Admittedly we could store our Legends in our recommended best practices and then refer to that. My usual preference is to have this stuff in a secondary document that must be read with the primary document. However that war is often fought with people you just want to read the primary document, even though this means boiler plate and copied information is scattered every (and killing trees).

Putting modeling conventions into the Legend is not akin to using a Dictionary for every word in a sentence. A better analogy would be a Glossary, somewhere to highlight terms that are uncommon or specific to your project. This sounds exactly like a Legend.

My preference would be to enhance the Legend element to allow me to describe everything. It's rather limited otherwise.

Since it currently is not suitable for the task it leaves me with two options:

1) Never us a Legend
2) Use another tool to create the Legend (and image importing isn't a seamless experience)

I think I'll lean towards never using a legend and capturing that in a best practises document.

[Eve]

2) Use another tool to create the Legend (and image importing isn't a seamless experience)

Did you know you can drag and drop an image from the file system onto a diagram?

[skiwi]

The responses here pretty much summarize my problem.

My preference would be to enhance the Legend element to allow me to describe everything. It's rather limited otherwise.

Well put.
Another option is to put in a feature request (though I don't rate our chances based on the above). Particularly suggesting using an image is unmaintainable, and the point of a model is maintainability.
By suggesting using an image there is an admission of a shortcoming, therefore it would be appropriate to remedy it.

PS. Gosh, look at this
Change look and feel of legends