Sequence diagrams

[qwerty]

Just a question to the users: is anyone using SDs (above V13.5) for real? Does nobody feel the pain when trying to create a sequence of messages?

q.

[Geert Bellekens]

Not for a while now. The lifesaver is to use Alt-drag to move the messages without messing up everything else.

Geert

[Modesto Vega]

I have used them in v15 but need to review them before I can make a meaningful contribution.

[qwerty]

It's not the moving of messages which annoys me endlessly: it's the creation process itself. I mean, who on earth has design that GUI? It must have been an alien. Oh, wait! Of course it was a Sparxian :-/ You drag the message from the QL. So far, so good (except that it always starts on base level which could be smarter of you were last in a self-call. But ok). And then: the message created is NOT selected. Nor do their properties show (well, that is a follow-up issue). So, you have to click it once again. Then you have to click into the message properties drop down. Click-clack. And choose the appropriate message. Why couldn't some pop-up let you select this upon message creation? Well, I don't know. Ok, so you have filled in all properties and you wan't to apply them. But how? There's no OK or Cancel button. Nuthin! Well, as for the operations/attributes there's also no such thing. Changes are applied directly. And if you happen to Ctrl-D (instead of Ctrl-C) it's gone down the drain with guarantee for no return. Juck! But here? So after some time you click elsewhere (!) outside the properties as you got sick and want to do something else, and what happens? You get a bloody warning that you have unsaved changes! Yes, of course. You gave me no way to save anything. What kind of GUI design is that? Straight from hell? I suppose so. And for now I have not gotten as far as resorting messages!

Luckily I'm no longer in the position that I have to tell coders to document their stuff using EA! If so I'd probably be better off to hire a bodyguard. Or two...

q.

[milasx]

I use them for real in version 14 and I tend to having to restart / delete all the previous messages when I have to make changes.

[qwerty]

I use them for real in version 14 and I tend to having to restart / delete all the previous messages when I have to make changes.

That really does not sound like you found a liking in it... Was that stupid behavior I mentioned already present in V14 (I would think so, but I more or less skipped that version as it buggered me too much).

q.

[timoc]

I feel your pain. This was a serious enough frustration and time sink with our people for us to consider PlantML for speeding things up. Sketching out SD's, and batch add to the model later.

[qwerty]

I hope someone from Sparx is reading this. But likely nothing will happen since it seems that only a few are really (not) using SDs :-/

q.

P.S. I'm going to use PlantUML to create SDs. Probably it could even be easy to import the results to EA with a bit of conventions.