Activity growing down with side branches for conditionals

0 votes
asked Nov 30, 2015 in Wanted features by anonymous
Is there a way to have some conditionals grow sideways on an Activity diagram? I currently have a large state machine where show the happy path proceeding top to bottom. I want to start adding side branches at every step that show failure mitigation, these are usually a fairly small set of steps. The main goal is to avoid complicating the representation of the main path, I want it visually clear where normal states are and the branches to be readily apparent.

Using the normal conditional I tried

<code>

if (Turn motor on) then (Success)

else (Fail)

:Abort;

:Send notification to user;

detach

end if

</code>

 

Unfortunately this complicates the happy path as all the arrows grow from the left side and wiggle their way back to center, rather than coming straight from the bottom and makes the diagram a lot less clear. I would like the main path to come from the bottom and the the branch to grow down on the right side of the main path.

I tried doing the same with an if..elseif block, which seems to almost do what I'd like, but it adds another branch off the elseif block that reconnects with the remainder of the state machine that I can't seem to get rid of with detach (I'm guessing it's trying to create an else branch). I get syntax errors if I try to detach an empty else condition, and can only get the representation I want by adding an empty state bubble using :; before the detach. Aside from the extra empty bubble, that looks like the representation I want.

Is there any solution to what I'm trying to do?

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