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Ericsson / papyrus-patches

A number of feature patches for Eclipse Papyrus fixing the Sequence diagrams
Eclipse Public License 2.0
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Let Papyrus forum know about the status of this project? #30

Open oliviercailloux opened 4 years ago

oliviercailloux commented 4 years ago

I consider using Papyrus for a course in UML but I do not want to let my students have too much pain with applying patches and the like or suffering bugs. More generally, I think that many users of Papyrus wonder about the current state of Sequence Diagrams, considering the popularity of this thread.

Please consider reporting the current status of this project in the forum (or elsewhere as you see fit), as far as you know (and if you don’t know, that’s good to know as well). Why is the code not merged, is the intention to merge at some point, is there a strong willingness to still improve the code, what’s the current usability state of the resulting software to create Sequence Diagrams, …?

acampesino commented 4 years ago

Hi,

Sorry for not answering before… I was on vacations.

What we have done in this alternative implementation of the sequence diagrams is basically strip all the GMF / GEF UI handling from the EditPolicies, and delegated to a logical representation of the diagram where we can apply the UI action to the whole diagram. In this way, when a message starting a execution specification is moved, we moved all the block together, inserting in a another part of the diagram. Our logical model, is a graph, where the entities in the diagram are nodes. After modifying that graph, we kind of reconstruct / re-layout the whole diagram or a part of it. This make the UI interaction much easier and user friendly. Right now it implements all type of messages, interaction uses, gates and execution specifications

The patch can be installed and uninstalled out-of the box as is a feature patch. If you are interested, I can make publish a more recent build, or you can use the nightly build:

https://ericsson.github.io/papyrus-patches/download/updates/nightly/

It is an update site, it just to install it.

I am in contact with the Papyrus development team and we have discuss the possibility for this implementation to replace the current one in Papyrus, but we need to support the complete range of UML construction first.

Best Regards, Antonio

oliviercailloux commented 4 years ago

Thanks for the information, that’s very good to know.

I am reluctant to make my students install patches over plug-ins: that’s a lot of manipulation and things which can go wrong for students not used to the Eclipse toolset, and with an increased risk of not knowing which component is responsible when a bug is encountered. So I think I’ll stick with the bare Papyrus install, and live with the drawbacks, for now, but happy to read that improvements are on the way.

“we need to support the complete range of UML construction first” ⇒ That’s a bit frightening: it sounds like a huge work. What do you mean, how big is this “complete range”? (It’s just to have a very rough idea on when this patch might be integrated: is this a matter of weeks, months, years?)

If I understand correctly, this patch does not solve the issue mentioned here? (This is not to blame anybody, of course you can’t solve every problem at once – I am just curious.)