[Uml-devel] u2 user interface

[Sebastian Stein]

Andrew Sutton <ansutton at kent.edu> [030325 13:20]:
> i suspect however, that in the new view (the use case view) the window
> will be split. the left half will contain a tree view (focused on the use
> case package) and the right will contain something else.

This seems to complex for me. Tomorrow I will make some screenshots of a
program called Aris. It is a business process modelling tool and I think a
business organisation modell is as complex as a software (UML) modell. So I
will show you how they handle it...

> > Clicking on a acteur, use case or association object would result in the
> > property window to be shown.
> 
> maybe a dialog. i don't think we should populate the view with that 
> information.

I thought about the current property dialogs in umbrello (version 1).
 
> > Maybe there could be a completly other approach. I mean in structured
> > analysis you first draw a context diagram. Then you can zoom in and get
> > data flow diagrams. Clicking on a function could show another DFD or the
> > actual code. You could go deeper and deeper. Clicking on a storage could
> > result in getting in a ERM.
> 
> that's an issue of linking and something i definitely think we should
> address.  i believe that would be called a "drill down" operation. the
> real question is how we can take standard UML (or modified) and make it
> work like that. i don't want to rule it out because its a very powerful
> technique.

Maybe we should take a look in the area of data warehouses and data marts. I
like to mention some terms like:

- drill down and roll up
- slice and dice
- visualize (change kind of visualization like pie or bar chart)
- drill-trough
- pivot

These are technics to view a data warehouse in different views for different
tasks. I haven't seen a very good tool for visualization in this sector, but
it is possible to do these operations with Excel on spreedsheets.
 
> > If I'm right, I think the UML model is just like a cube. You can have
> > different views on this cube by rotating it. You can zoom in and zoom out
> > and make slices. So it is only a question of navigation.
> 
> interesting analogy. i would certainly agree that there are different 
> dimensions to UML. in fact if you look at all the facets they satisfy 
> notations for all 5 of the 4+1 views. if you consider each of the 4+1 views 
> to be a slice, then we need to really think about how we represent each 
> slice.

The problem might be, that an UML modell has more then 3 dimensions, so it
is quite hard to show it in a 3D view.
 
Steinchen
-- 
Umbrello UML Modeller
Description     : UML diagram drawing tool for KDE with code generation
Homepage        : http://www.umbrello.org/