[John Hebley]

I am developing a fairly sizeable model and am becoming frustrated by a number of annoyances.

1. The Association class loses it’s association link (the dashed line) when the model is saved and reopened.

2. Deleting an Association class, and then replacing it with the “undo” does not correctly restore the associations to other classes. The associations are still there, but I cannot get them to attach to Association class that was deleted and then restored.

3. The cardinality is sometimes displayed and sometimes not. I think this is weather dependant 🙂

4. Zoom….Any chance of getting a zoom in/out feature. On large models a total overview would be appreciated.

Thanks
John

[Riyad Kalla]

John,
I’m sorry for these problems, let me see if I can get a bit more detail from you on each one.

1) Is the association removed from the diagram or from the model? If you look at the outline view and change it to package centric, can you still see the association listed?

2) Sounds like a bug… I’m assuming the association is still in the model/outline view?

3) Hmmm, if you move the nodes around does it suddenly display (maybe a clipping issue) or only on some links it’s diplayed and on others it’s not displayed at all?

4) Sure, it’s in the toolbar on the top of the diagram, on the far right side (maybe a bad position?), it might be getting clipped if you can’t see it.

[John Hebley]

1. I am removing it from the diagram. I actually find this confusing, since in my mind the diagram is the model. Have you overloaded the term here?

2. There are two types of relationship here. The first is the associative class association with the many-to-many relationship. That is restored correctly. The second type is a 1-1 or 1-* relationship between the associative class and some other class. Those are left hanging, ie, they do not reconnect with the associative class.

3. It certainly looks like a display issue of some kind. Just selecting the association will often make the cardinality appear. If you look in the properties they are still there, even if not displayed. Don’t think it’s clipping since there is plenty of real estate available.

4. Duhhh. If I had two good eyes I would have seen it. Sorry!

5. Can we allow the name of the relationship to be moved from it’s default central location? It’s not always a convenient location, even though it is the most logical place to put it.

– John

PS. Thanks for a great tool. Even with these problems it is light years ahead of more expensive commercial products.

[Riyad Kalla]

1) Possibly… the model are all the entities, the diagram is a visualization of these entities or a subset of them (e.g. only the ones you DnD to the diagram). For example when you export/import XMI, it’s only the model portion of your diagram, there is no diagram information stored in XMI.

2) Sounds like a bug, I’ll file it.

3) Will file this too.

4) No problem, this might indicate that positioning could be less than perfect…

5) Not at the moment, but that is an existing enhancement request for the reasons you state.

I’ll toss these back to the UML team and see if these are things we can improve relatively quickly.

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