Inline Tables

When defining how each Element and stereotype, you already have two main choices:

• Inline formatting – where each attribute is printed in a separate paragraph, one under the other. This looks good where there is lots to say about each attribute, but looks odd when there are lots of attributes with a small about of information about each.
• Table formatting – where each element is a row in a table. This looks good when there are lots of attributes, with a bit of information about each, but less good where there is lots of data for one or two attributes.

But what to do when you have both? For example, in a Use Case, where you may have lots to say in the Description/Notes field, but also lots of little attributes like version, author, complexity etc.

The solution is to use Inline Tables.

These are still Inline elements, but instead of having one paragraph per attribute, you can group attributes together in sub-tables, either across the page (Horizontal inline tables) or down (vertical inline tables).

A Horizontal inline table would look like this:

And a Vertical inline table looks like this:

You can see that the vertical looks better if some of the attributes have a little bit more data in them.

You can have many different vertical and horizontal inline tables for each element, so you can group similar attributes together:

In this example, we have added some additional headings – line breaks with titles – into the inline definition, for the ‘Control Information’ and ‘Cross References’ text, to space out the tables and give the reader some additional guidance.

We’ve also added an additional Vertical inline table to pull together the Actor and Requirements cross-references, and give the ‘Description (notes)’ attribute it’s own vertical inline table.

Horizontal and vertical inline tables can also be used with Word Table Styles, to add even more formatting options.