Will you add swimlanes to Acticity Diagrams?

Question

Hi,

swimlanes tell me who is responsible for an action.

E.g. a class represents a swimlane, the method calls another method in another class, which is a swimlane on its own.

It helps to understand complexity.

Look for example to the last example in your new Activity diagram examples: There is no "separation of concern". It is hard to understand who is responsible for the actions.

I could imagine something like

swimlane
:first;
:second;
endswimlane

Best regards,

Klaus

Answer 1

I would take Bonita as a model (not Activity diagrams but Business Modeling Notation):

http://www.bonitasoft.com/

It is open source.

I would not make it complicated:

* No nested swimlanes

* Just horizontal ones, no vertical

* Maybe you can adapt something what you already have

* Could be just two lines with a vertikal textbox on the side on the left

I use bonitas Business Process Modelling for source code! very often. I misuse it for this purpose. And it helps me a lot.

Everything becomes complicated in software development and my impression is in the last years more than before.

I cannot think that a programmer can cope with this situation without some modelling help.

And your tool is great for this purpose! (Very fast. I use gvim (on windows), F5 generate -> voilà).

Thank you very much. Ich will propagate it to others ...

Answer 2

Hello,

In version 7967, you can use this as beta feature;

@startuml
|swinlane1|
:first;
:second;
|swinlane2|
:third;
if (foo) then
:something;
endif
|swinlane1|
:back to swinline1;
|swinlane2|
:back to swinline2;
@enduml

http://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/img/NOmn3e0W40HxNa6ffPJm6eH3BkfT0YGsFDxJn9ZGpknEhnVIuGcMhcp2KfjJja9WYaxrJngHBMCHXabFYNdMBGF9b4yGGvjJG17J_tc2gm-xRgnVXiA6vkYDkm40

Some points are still missing:

• Title for swimlanes
• Swimlanes separations
• ...

Tests and feedback are welcome, especially on the syntax itself : is it really convinient ?

Thanks,

Comments

Hello,

Thanks for the report : this has been solved in version 7969.

Regards,

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The concept is great, but the Activity syntax feels a bit kludgy.

Aside from missing some labeling, it is very positional in nature and not as declarative as I had hoped.

I was hoping for something more like:

@startuml

swimlane Swimlane1
swimlane Swimlane2

Swimlane1.first --> Swimlane1.second : label1
Swimlane1.second --> Swimlane2.third : label2
Swimlane2.third --> Swimlane2.if (foo) : label3

Swimlane2 if (foo) then { Swimlane2.something : true }
Swimlane2.if (foo) else { : false }
Swimlane2.done --> Swimlane1.back to swimlane1 : return

Swimlane1.back to swimlane1 --> Swimlane2.back to swimlane2 : go back

@enduml

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Is this available in the Confluence Plug-in?

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Yes, I use the current confluence plugin and this feature is included.