WARNING: Accidentally purging Element Features

[Paolo F Cantoni]

It's been a long-standing idiosyncrasy of EA that purging¹ an element feature from the repository {Command: ElementInlineFeaturesDelete [Ctrl+Shift+Del]} occurs silently.  That is, there is NO usual warning dialog:  
(?) Delete selected items from the model and all diagrams?
WARNING: This action cannot be undone.

[Yes] [No]

Presumably, and here I'm giving Sparx the benefit of the doubt, to help prevent accidental purging of the feature, a complex key combination is defined to execute the command:  [Ctrl+Shift+Del].

You have to be pretty definite to use that key combination and so EA purges the feature (attribute or operation) from the repository.

Because it takes time to set up models carefully, I have set up EA (well tried anyway) to use ONLY [Ctrl+Del] (or in this specific case [Ctrl+Shift+Del]) to purge from the repository.  The [Del] key has been relegated to only removing vertexes and arcs from diagrams.

You can imagine my shock when I found that accidentally brushing the delete key also purged the selected feature from the repository!  

Further investigation revealed that just about all key combinations of the [Del] key will silently purge the feature - I noticed it purely serendipitously.

I hope this is bug (and not by design) - which needs to be fixed REAL soon...

Reported,
Paolo

¹See: Naming - Remove vs Delete vs Purge for a discussion on the various concepts.

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Sparx have allocated the following reference number: 10045541 to this report while it is being investigated.

If you can confirm the behaviour, please send a report to Sparx indicating so.

TIA,
Paolo

[Geert Bellekens]

Indeed, I just tested it on 8.0.855 and the attribute I selected in the diagram was deleted from the model without warning, just by pressing the delete key.
I'll send a bug report as well.

Geert

[«Midnight»]

Did you notice when this first appeared? Should I downgrade to the final 7.5 release until this is solved?

[beginner]

Deleting attributes from the diagram with simple DEL has ever (since editing on diagram had been introduced) been this way (just verified with 7.5). I always did put this under EAUI.

b.

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Deleting attributes from the diagram with simple DEL has ever (since editing on diagram had been introduced) been this way (just verified with 7.5). I always did put this under EAUI.

b.

I guessed as much - but then why bother putting in the complex key combination ([Ctrl+Shift+Del]) as the shortcut?

It should be fixed...

Paolo

[beginner]

Sure it should. Like so many other things. I guess you could achieve a masters degree in social software engineering by analyzing how Sparx have de-developed their product: EAUI - A Case Study.

b.