Interfaces of Super-Components

Question

Hello PlantUML Team,

I would like to ask one more question. In a component diagram I want to compose some components to a "super"-component. I figured out this is possible with:

@startuml
skinparam componentstyle uml2

component SuperC {
    component SubC1 {
        component "Comp 1"
        component "Comp 2"
    }

    component SubC2 {
        component "Comp A"
        component "Comp B"
    }
}
@enduml

And further on I tried to have another component communicating with the SuperC via an interface ... what is not possible. It seems to me, that the SuperC is not used as a component but as a type of a package.

Is there a possibility to connect a SuperComponent to an interface?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Höri

Answer 1

Unfortunatly, this is not possible today, basically because GraphViz does not simply allow egde between cluster and node (well, sort of).

The good news is that GraphViz offers a workaround : see http://www.graphviz.org/content/FaqClusterEdge

This workaround has been already used for state diagram BTW:
@startuml
state foo1 {
  state foo2
}
state foo3
foo2 --> foo3

state foo4
foo1 --> foo4
@enduml

So since this is a Very Asked Feature, we will study how to have the same capability for class/component/usecase diagrams.
We will post a message here when we will have more info.