Sunday 18 November 2018

Rational Rhapsody Tip #47 - Condition Marks On Sequence Diagrams (Intermediate)

This is really a rounding out video that delves into Condition Marks on sequence diagrams. Interestingly, despite 10 years of working with Rhapsody it was only through recent automation work that I discovered that they could be bound to model elements. I'm not sure why I missed it. Anyway, it was one of those staring you in the face, not seeing it moments, so I thought I'd spin this "eureka" finding into a video (ok, I admit, it's not that exciting, but I need new Rhapsody video topics!).

Basically, Condition Marks in IBM Rational Rhapsody sequence diagrams can be used to annotate information about the state of an object at a time in a sequence. Usually they represent states in the object's state machine, although you can also provide information about the state of attributes (or anything else as it matters). By default, they will be free flowing text. As this video shows, however, you can check a box and choose to select an element (the most obvious being a state in the relevant state chart). Whether this is valuable may depend on what you’re doing, of course. As this video shows, if you’re able to animate your model then you can create sequence on the fly that have the state value’s annotated in the condition marks. Enjoy. I hope it’s useful to someone.