Send-clauses in state machines

Hi all

Can anyone tell me where I can add send-clauses in state transition specifications?
I wanna use the syntax “event-signature ‘[’ guard-condition ‘]’ ‘/’ action-expression ‘^’ send-clause”.

Best Regards,
Mattias

Hi Mattias,

Thank you for your post. I’m sorry that we cannot find “send-clause” in UML Specification. Could you please provide some references about send-clause for us to take a look? Thanks in advance!

Best regards,
Lilian Wong

Hi Lilian,

Thank you for the answer.
I took the expression “send-clause” directly from the book “UML 2 Toolkit” from Wiley (http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471463612.html). It is the term they use for outgoing messages that occures at transitions in state machines.

The autors describe the syntax “event-signature ‘[’ guard-condition ‘]’ ‘/’ action-expression ‘^’ send-clause” for state machine transitions in chapter 5, Dynamic Modeling.

In the general tab in a VP UML state transition Effect fileld correlates to ‘/’ and the Guard field correlates to ‘[]’. My problem is that I can’t find any fileld that correlates to ‘^’ in the syntax described above.

I hope this help to clearify my problem.

Best Regards,
Mattias

Hi Mattias,

Thanks for replying. We checked UML 1.5 Specification, it states
event-name ‘(’ comma-separated-parameter-list ‘)’ ‘[’ guard-condition‘]’ ‘/’action-expression
(as shown as image). This is the closest notation of state transition from UML Specification (we checked UML 2.0 or newer versions as well).

Therefore we still cannot find any definition of “send-clause”… Is it possible for you to provide some more information?

Best regards,
Lilian Wong


UML_1.5_spec.png

Hi again

I’m afraid that I don’t have any better reference than my book. And if you checked the UML specification and concluded that the ‘^’ syntax is not a part of it I guess it must be the writers own idea of how to describe outgoing events from state machines. What made me believe it was a part of the standard was that the book describe it as “The formal syntax for specifying a state transition is as follow: event-signature ‘[’ guard-condition ‘]’ ‘/’ action-expression ‘^’ send-clause”.

In my current project we decided to add the ‘^’ character manually in the effect field when modeling outgoing events to solve the problem for now.

Best regards,
Mattias

Hi Mattias,

Thanks for your reply. Please let me know if you need any help again.

By the way, I’m glad to notify you that we just released VP Suite 4.2. Feel free to download the evaluation version of the new version from our website ( http://www.visual-paradigm.com/download/ ). Details about new features in this new version can be found from:
http://www.visual-paradigm.com/support/vpuml/releasenotes/720.jsp

Best regards,
Lilian Wong