Navigating behaviour

[Heather Wallace]

Is there any way in eaDocX / eaXL of navigating the association of a classifier (in our case a stereotype of activity) with an operation via the behaviour tab?

Ideally we want to go one step further and list the input and output data of the activity, by analysis of the information flows into and out of the operation execution in sequence diagrams. I can’t see any way at all of navigating such relationships.

Heather

[eadocX Support]

You’ve lost me here, Heather – it’s been a long week!
Could you explain in a little more details please?

[Heather Wallace]

I’ll try, but my brain’s a bit fried too. If need be I can send examples and desired output next week. Basically to get the data consumed by the activity stereotype I would need to navigate:

Activity -> Operation (activity is specified as behaviour of operation) -> Message (to which the operation was assigned) -> Information flow (realized by the message) -> Items conveyed (by the information flow).

Data produced is too complicated for a Friday!

[Heather Wallace]

Any thoughts on the data consumed by activity described in the previous reply?

Heather

[eadocX Support]

Just to make sure I get it, could you mail me a little XML with an example of the relationships ?

[Heather Wallace]

I’m not sure I know what you’re after. Do you want me to make up some XML that represents the relationships in the model? Or that represents the output?

Or do you want me to somehow extract XML from the model that represents the relationships?

I find it easier to think in terms of hops!

[eadocX Support]

– draw an example diagram(s) which show the relationships you have created
– export it as XMI
– say what the the fragment of the document which will look like, which traverses the multiple hops involved
..so I can see if eaDocX can do it!

[Heather Wallace]

Hi,
It is not possible to show all the relationships on one diagram, so I’ve built and exported a mini package containing a sequence diagram, a relationships diagram and all the involved elements. The note in yellow on the relationship diagram explains what I am hoping to achieve in terms of hops.

The document output would be as follows:

Stating at (e.g.) the Sensor Infrastructure Functions Package
1. [Package Name]
1.1 SEFunction: [SEFunction Name]
[SE function description]
Logical data elements consumed*:(list of names of data elements consumed)
Logical data elements produced*:(list of names of data elements produced)

repeat for other SE Functions, as 1.2, 1.3 etc
* See yellow note on relationships diagram for expected hop sequence.

I hope this is clearer,

Heather

• This reply was modified 11 years, 4 months ago by Heather Wallace. Reason: Formatting when uploaded to site looked confusing

[Heather Wallace]

Hi,
I thought it would be useful to mock up the anticipated output. As I did so I noticed an error in use of activations in the sequence diagram, so I have made two minor changes. Please find attached the replacement XMI and a Word file with the target output for each of the packages.

Heather

[eadocX Support]

OK – I’ll cut to the chase with this.
There’s no way eaDocX is ever going to support relationships of this complexity.
Our design point is to create great documents in a simple way, and this is WAY beyond ‘simple’!.

We support multi-hop-connector relationships, but the problem here is that you have two other kinds of more subtle relationship:
– the Method.behaviour one, which has caused me to add some support for this in the next version, but only to let method.behaviour hyperlink to an element
– the connection between a Message in an SD, and the Operation it calls. This is ‘fudged’ in EA (IMHO) using the name of the message/operation as a matching string. We’ve been asked before to make this a navigable relationship, but I just can’t make it reliable.
There MAY be some help on the way, by allowing you to write your own EA-Script based ‘exit’ to return hand-built HTML for eaDocX to insert directly, but that’s looking hard as well!

[Heather Wallace]

Oh dear,

This fudging, as you put it, puts EA way behind some competitors in the way it handles data flows. I was hoping we could simply address this via the output, but it seems that a more complex solution will be required.

Thanks for giving it some thought.

Heather

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