Rotate Diagram Objects

[shaft]

We us EA as our architecture design tool (rather than visio) because it allows us to keep things organized in one model.  It would be a nice set of features if EA began to support some general "drawing" capabilities like rotate diagram objects.

This wouldn't likely ever be used on things like class diagrams or sequence diagrams, but when you start to get into "fuzzy" architectural pictures, I've had a few occasions where I wish I could rotate an object.

-Jeff

[Dave_Bullet]

Second this too.  Would you want the name to rotate with the object (or keep horizontal?).

Reason to rotate the name is it reduces the "footprint" the object takes up and may allow for connectors to fight snuggly (rather than draw over text).

Cheers,
David.

[shaft]

I would mimic Visio.  When they rotate an object, the text rotates as well.

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Sounds good to me...

Paolo

[mark.myers]

I would like this too. I am building a diagram where I would like to be able to rotate a text element, ie have text running vertically.

[sargasso]

Just as a DA* question...

If the model is so complex that elements have to be rotated to "make it clearer", i.e. the audience has to rotate their head to read it, do you really think it wil help?

By way of example, I recently was trying to decipher a sectioning diagram ("drainage" to some of you). We wnded up having to drive out to the site and put the diagram on the ground to work out the sections te draughtsperson was referring to.  Even then, he had rotated some of the sections totally out of alignment with each other that we had to get him out to explain.


bruce

* Devil's Advocate

[mark.myers]

Thanks, Bruce, but its not because its a complicated model that I want to rotate; it's for a display reason. Specifically, I have a boundary shape with vertical and horizontal swimlanes representing a business value to effort "graph" upon which I place components and I want the text on the vertical axis to be rotated along the direction of the axis.

[«Midnight»]

The big question still remains: did the engineer rotate the text on the sections?

On the whole I agree with the premise of this thread. It would be nice to see some (basic) drawing features in EA, now that the product is covering such a broad feature space. One nice element would be the ability to rotate text - and to expect EA to do so for us - in an easy predictable manner. A first step would be to allow rotation of an 'entire' display element, including contained text.

That's not to suggest this is something to approach without forethought. Without some real planning this could well extend EA's "Unique Interface" paradigm (read "problem") into whole new areas.

David

[ihodgetts]

I wanted to do something similar for one of my deployment diagrams. Effectively my idea was to have the artifact 'surrounded' by all the possible servers it could be deployed on (we have several instances of the same app on multiple servers) plus show which other servers are used (that the app has dependancies on). There would be a row above, a row below, and a column either side of the app indicating the range of servers. I also wanted to show which servers were NOT used for that particular version of the app (hence the need to show a large number of nodes in 2 rows and 2 columns).

Due to the large number of servers, I could not fit a row of them across the page without rotating the text (to be vertical). The two columns to the left and right of the app were fine.

I ended up only showing the actual servers used (rather than highlighting those NOT used) but given the option to rotate text, I'd like to try my first idea.

I'll keep a look out for such a feature being added...