Animacian for Activity Diagram

Animacian is a tool that helps you makes activity flows active by presenting the flow in animation form. This can make your design more attractive by animating it. Besides, you can control the flow of animation yourself to help demonstrating your work to client with your annotation. It also calculates all possible paths of the diagram, making the design more accurate. Starting from VP Suite version 3.4 Service Pack 2, Animacian is enhanced to support Activity Diagram.

Animating a path

Here we have an Activity Diagram. Let's animate the flow using Animacian.

1.	To launch an animation, select Tools > Animacian from the main menu, or press on the Animacian button on the toolbar.
	This opens the Activity Diagram Animacian dialog box where you can select an execution path to play an animation.
	Let's go through different parts of this dialog box.
	(1) The buttons and slider are for controlling the flow of animation. (2) The Paths list lists all possible executions of the diagram. You can select a path and animate it by pressing the Play button. (3) The Components list displays the components that form the selected Path. Pressing on a component will highlight the first shape of the chosen path until the chosen shape, in the opening diagram. (4) Filter helps removing the undesired paths by specifying the end result of fork nodes. More about filter will be described in the section below. (5) The Option pane allows you to make the following changes: - List also the invalid, non play-able paths in the Paths list (More about valid and invalid paths will be covered below). - Dim the components that are not a part of the selected path. - Jump to the first node of a chosen path upon selection, or keep staying at the current viewing region. - Minimize this dialog box (Activity Diagram Animacian) when playing an animation. - Avoid accidental editing when playing by locking the diagram.
2.	Select a path from the Paths list for animating. A path is a possible way of walking through the flow.
	By making a selection, the path will be highlighted on the diagram. Since the option Dim other path is selected, those non involved shapes will be dimmed.
3.	We can select a component in the Components list to make it highlight from the first shape in the path until the selected one.
4.	Animate the chosen path by pressing the Play button.
	This starts the animation. A token which looks like a tiny black dot will appear and traverse along the path. When it is arriving a shape, the arriving shape will be highlighted.
	The animation will end when it reaches the end of the path. You can travel along the execution by updating the slider position at the bottom of the diagram.

Filtering paths

When there is a decision node with multiple out-going paths, we can configure filter to reduce paths by controlling the flow

1.	To configure filter, click on the Filter... button in the Activity Diagram Animacian dialog box.
	This displays the Filter Configuration dialog box.
2.	The possible selections for filtering are the out-going flows from decision nodes.
	By specifying the allowed flows, those inappropriate paths will be discarded.

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