Sequence diagram - slanted arrows - manual end time control

Question

Currently slanted arrows can be generated by "artificially" shifting the arrow end time relatively to the arrow's start time. That can be useful in some cases, but does not uncover the full potential of the slanted arrows. At the moment (to my knowledge) there is no way to represent following arrow combinations:

|               |
|-------------->|
|         /-----|
|        /      |
|-------------->|
|      /        |
|<----/         |
|               |

or

|               |               |
|-------------->|               |
|         /-----|               |
|        /      |               |
|       /       |-------------->|
|      /        |<--------------|
|     /         |               |
|<---/          |               |
|               |               |

This type of lines are very common when dealing with distributed systems or network protocols where asynchronous behaviour and network delays (delay between arrow start and end points) are second nature.

Existing anchors syntax feels like a direction towards such functionality. Given 2 anchor points (attached to participants instead of an arrow) it should be fairly easy to draw the diagonal line between them.

Comments

Is there any support for this kind of diagrams as of today in PlantUML?

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Not to my knowledge. Please consider upvoting the question to improve it's visibility.

Answer 1

This is a very necessary feature SFAIK. Please plan to support this as asynchronous sends and receives are very commonly found in systems nowadays.