Where is diagram layer data stored?

[MichaelJ]

...Bit harsh on Sparx there mate...

Lol. I don't think harshness is unwarranted. EA is a frustrating product. They always deliver new half-baked/half-tested features that, on the surface look good and exciting, but use them and your blood pressure increases. Just pure unadulterated frustration. The impression is that Sparx hires inexperienced, outsourced, cheap, developers that lack quality delivery, good sense of user experience, and commitment to improving the product.

The Prgramatic Programmer (by Andrew Hunt, David Thomas) is a good book

• Tip 7: Make quality a requirements issue
• Tip 8: Invest regularly in your knowledge portfolio
• Tip 27: Don't assume it -- Prove It
• Tip 52: Work with a User to think like a user
• Tip 69: Gently exceed your users' expectations

If they built the product with an attitude of "Hey! How would I feel if I had to use the product in this way?", then most surely there would not be a sense of "harshness" from users.

...And that in turn breeds a culture not of good design but of cobbling things together....

Yes, agreed with your statements. Although, just because something is the way it is, does not mean it must remain that way. It can be reasoned that if the dev team are ruled by a culture of poor design choices, the evident solution is either

• retrain/educate the developers/managers
• terminate the bad developers/managers and hire new ones

Logically, how long can "cobbled" systems be sustained?

...Or it might be that tinkering with the UI is easily done and easily tested...

Honestly, the current impression is that they do NOT tinker or test UI (multiple examples can be provided  ).

For one example, take a look at the new feature that shows an element's composite diagram (it has the little "eye" icon). Good feature? Yes absolutely. Now, resize the window taller, wider, narrower or shorter. Do you notice anything? Not. A. Single. Scrollbar. A lack of scrollbars means now a user cannot pan around the composite diagram if the window is smaller than the diagram size. Neither can the user pan around if the composite diagram is LARGER than your screen size.

So, given [Tip 52] listed above, a good quality developer/development manager/QA tester would have stopped to question this user experience. Somehow, it all passed "testing" and what paying customers get is "Look! New Feature! It DOES shows diagram!" (poof! Smoke bomb. The Sparx marketing team walks quickly off stage while we are distracted and our eyes sting from the strange "feature gas" released )

[qwerty]

Pretty much my impression. Sigh. Luckily, being an old man, my tendency to a raising blood pressure is almost gone. I can just wish luck to the young people fighting for a better world...

q.

[MichaelJ]

...tendency to a raising blood pressure is almost gone. I can just wish luck to the young people fighting for a better world...

With age comes much wisdom. With wisdom follows peace. Peace bestows lower blood pressure.

How fortunate you are that EA does not have a tight grip on your blood pressure or frustration levels! I imagine you calmly swan through the EA UI with nary a concern or a care, shrugging off their non-sensical design choices? While the remaining paying customers literally foam at the mouth enduring short-term seizures due to dumbfounding user experiences thought to be only a myth, but now observed in the wild, alive, unchained, untamed and unrestrained within EA.

[Uffe]

I'm gonna step out here, just wanted to add one thing.

Logically, how long can "cobbled" systems be sustained?

Long as the money rolls in. Ask Microsoft.

/U

[Ian Mitchell]

So to bring this therapy session to a close....
The Sparx approach of 'never change the schema' is at least consistent: last change was 3.5 -> 4.0, and that was a pain.
OK, so implementing new features by overloading the schema does at least mean Sparx can hide the nasty bits behind the API: if we choose to go behind the API and fiddle about, then we should expect to see some strange stuff. Better that than a new schema every year.
Perhaps the solution is for Sparx to document these internals a little better - and so allow Q some more free time.
That's the case for the defence.
In this case, it's just poor design: the layer data obviously belongs in t_diagramobject, and they made a bad choice.
Anyway, that's it - back to work people. I suggest you all adopt the EA User Group practice of only bitching about Sparx for max 5 minutes every hour, leaving lots of time for more productive work.
(what's that silence? Ah - the Sparx dev team....Let's see if Geoff allows them to comment :-)