Maybe the question has been asked before, but I failed to find something about it. I have in my UML diagrams (in my particular case an Action in an Activity Diagram) some elements that I connected to ‘children’ diagrams, that are basically a detail of how the given element works. If I click on the element, then subsequently click the little arrow on the bottom right, I can see which diagram is linked to the element.
That’s all fine, but I was wondering if it would be possible somehow to change the appearance of the element in the diagram. Explicitly, say I create an Action that has no sub-diagram connected to it. That would appear in the normal way. Now I create another Action, which is associated to a sub-diagram. That Action has for example a different color, or maybe the text is printed differently, or … I don’t really mind how the appearance is changed, but it would be nice to be able to immediately see which actions have some underlying sub-diagram.
Thank you for your suggestion. Would you consider using the “Show Model Element Indicators” function? By pressing the “Show Model Element Indicators” button on top of the diagram toolbar, the arrow button will be rendered for shapes that contain sub-diagram.
Thank you for responding. I became aware of this function shortly after writing my original question. Yet it does not really fulfill what I would like to achieve:
As far as I can see, these buttons are not rendered when producing documentation
I’d like to change the outlook of elements based on many other tests as well, or maybe even change the outlook based on the type of sub-diagram, a bit like the conditional formatting one can do in Google Spreadsheet.
Could you give me some suggestions about the appearance you want? What to show for what conditions? We are a bit nervous because the formatting of shape could be meaningful. For example, an italic class name implies that the class is abstract.
I was actually a little impatient, so in the meantime I created a ‘feature request’-ticket in the Support-ticketing system with some thoughts regarding this (ticket DJD-961-36328). It’s kind of a braindump of ideas, not a very precisely defined description, because I’m not sure how many users would potentially be interested in such a feature and what are good options for those.
