Enhanced Usability of Sequence Diagram

Sequence diagrams (SD) are one of the most popular diagrams in UML. It is a very useful 'story-teller' to end-users and business analysts as they can easily visualize interactions between different parties. From an IT professional's point of view SD is also the best tool to show interactions in sub-systems and at class level.

Sequence diagrams are a very effective communication tool with very little effort needed to learn to draw or understand them. In this release the usability of SD has been greatly improved. We'll go through the enhancements one by one.

About Creating Shapes

Support Drag and Drop BPMN Lane to Sequence Diagram to Form Actor

We now support deriving UML Actor from BPMN Lane, which both represents role, but in different context. First, activate the Model Tree. Next, select a BPMN Lane model. Then, hold the mouse button and drag to the Sequence Diagram. Finally, release the mouse button to form an Actor.

Automatic Actor Creation in Sub-Diagram

When you create a sub-sequence diagram from a use case that is connected with an Actor, the sub-diagram will have the connected actor automatically created for you.

Automatic Combined Fragment Expansion

When you create a sequence message from an activation or from a part of a lifeline inside a combined fragment through the resource-centric interface, the combined fragment will expand itself to cover the created sequence message if necessary.

Smart Positioning for Note Object

By moving the mouse cursor over a sequence message, the Note resource icon will appear. When you click on the resource icon, it will create a Note for you, which connect to the message with an Anchor, and is located at a position that won't step onto your current sequence messages or lifelines. Most likely, it will be located at the right-hand-side of the adjacent Lifeline.

Automatic Activation Expansion

When you create a create message from an activation through the resource-centric interface, the activation will extend itself to cover the created message, if necessary. This reduce time spend on resizing the activation. Note that this behavior applies to creating normal sequence message, too.

Allow Moving Self Message in Creation

Moving message in creation let you position the message anywhere along the lifeline when the message is created. This is useful because the default position may not be what you expected.

About Editing
Intelligent Copy and Paste of Message
	Copy and Paste Trunk of Messages
	When editing Sequence Diagram, we often need to reuse some or even a trunk of messages. Recreating similar messages is a time consuming task, not only for creating, but also for making the distances between messages conform and making sure the messages are named correctly.
	Now, copy and paste is enhanced to solves all these problems. You can copy several messages and paste immediately below a selected message, or after the last message if no message is currently selected to paste. With this enhancement, you can copy and paste multiple messages with distances between message, message types and the message names preserved.
	Mapping Lifeline when Pasting across Diagrams
	We often need to use multiple Sequence Diagrams to model similar interactions. They could be alternative scenarios, or simply different scenarios but with similar flows. Take the following simple Task Management System as an example. A Sequence Diagram is used for modeling the process of prioritizing tasks by manager. Now, we want to model the process of reporting progress by engineer, and found that the message flows related to login can be reused.
	Then, we can copy the messages from the source diagram.
	and paste to the target one.
	This shows the Mapping LifeLine for Pasted Messages dialog box. For Actor(s) and LifeLine(s) that are connected by the copied message but are not appearing in the target diagram, you need to map them to either an existing one that appear on the target diagram, or create a new one. For this case, we can map Manager to Engineer.
	This pastes the messages under the selected message.
Smart Actor and Lifeline Bounds Detection
To select several Actors and Lifelines, you can simply block select the Actor shapes and the Linelife boxes without the need of selecting from the whole shape from top to bottom. This increase the efficiency in selecting multiple Actors and Lifeline.
Automatic Update of Activation Background Color
When you change the background color of a Lifeline, the activation along the Lifeline will show in the same color as the Lifeline. This reduces time in editing the color of Lifeline and activations separately.
Better Positioning of Self Message Caption
In the previous release, after editing a self/recursive message's name, its caption might step on the connector if it is too long because it was aligned center. Now, the caption is changed to align left, which makes the caption appear right to the connector without covering it.

Resources