Use Case - Primary / Secondary Actors

[crd]

How have others distinguished between Primary and Secondary Actors for a Use Case?

Thanks in advance,
Carol

[Geert Bellekens]

Carol,

They are often distinguished by their location on the diagram relative to the use case.
I think usually left = primary, right is secondary.

We do no make that distinction at my current client.

Geert

[crd]

I need to be able to distinguish for reporting purposes for my client.

[crd]

Sorry - hit Enter too soon.  What I think my options are:
1.  Tagged Values of UC - Primary Actors / Secondary Actors

• Drawback - could be out of sync with other relationships between actor and UC
• Pro - stored right with UC

2.  Tagged value on relationship between Actor and UC - never used this not sure whether good idea or not.

Any other thoughts?

[jfzouain]

Hi

I will tell you how I have managed this complex situation.
Actor - in General Tab just say this Actor can be a User, Super User, Help User and so on. Or create different actors per user.

Use cases - in each Use Case create a Constraint per actor what can he can do or not do in this Use Case. This way you can have a Precondition per  User.
Hope this help.

[qwerty]

I usually distinguish them via the relation. A primary is connected via a (directed) association while the secondary is connected via a use relation.

q.

[crd]

Thank you for your responses.  I ended up doing something close to q's suggestion.  I stereotyped the Association lines as "primary" and "secondary"

Does this solution break any UML Use Case rules?

Now to figure out how to manage the RTF generator to be able to report on them separately.  

Carol

[qwerty]

In certain situations I also used <<primary>> and <<secondary>> as stereotypes for associations. This is not breaking any UML UC rules. So go ahead.

Can't help with RTF, though.

q.

[Matt Taylor]

Generally if a directed Association has the arrow head at the use case it is a Primary and if the arrow head is at the actor it is a secondary.  We use eaDocx to report on this and it works well.

[crd]

Thanks!

Is there a "switch" to turn the << >> notation off around a  <<stereotype>> ?

[KP]

Thanks!

Is there a "switch" to turn the << >> notation off around a  <<stereotype>> ?

There is no switch, but for a connector, you can give the stereotype the following shape script:

Code: [Select]

label middlebottomlabel
{
      print("#stereotype#");
}