Conditional Drawing of Box Participants in Sequence Diagram

Question

Hi 

I am using parameters to drive conditional drawing of participants in box groups in a sequence diagram - I am running on planttext.com

Sequence Blocks setup as

'===PART 1===
!ifdef PART1

Sequence goes herr

!endif

I was helped in an earlier question with preprocessor functions - DRAW works without fault

!unquoted function DRAW($x) return %set_variable_value($x, 1)

'====DRAW Specific Diagrams by Comment/Uncommenting Line===
'====Only uncomment one line at a Time======================
'DRAW(PART1)
DRAW(PART2)
'DRAW(PART3)
'DRAW(PART4)
'DRAW(PART5)
'DRAW(PARTX)
'DRAW(PARTY)
'DRAW(PART_REF)
'DRAW(PART_TMX)

My new function adds a control participant if the defined variable exists

!unquoted function addService($part, $service, $as)
    !ifdef $part
    '!if %variable_exists($part)
        control "$service" as $as
    !endif
!endfunction

Used as follows

box "AWS " #LightBlue
    participant "mPlatform" as mp
    addService("PART_REF", "RefDat_MS", "rdms")
    participant "PING Access" as pa
end box

box "ApplicationZone Z5 " #LightGrey
    participant "Data Power" as dp_z5
    participant "Ping Federate" as pf_z5
    participant "ESP" as esp
    addService("PART2", "Service Portal", "portal") 
    !ifdef PART10
    participant "Service Portal" as portal
    participant "API Gateway" as apig
    participant "Service" as service
    !endif
end box

In my function

 !ifdef $part does not discriminate between defined parameters and inserts all services

  !if %variable_exists($part)does not insert any services into the box 

Is this a bug or am I missing something ?

Ambition is to have dynamic participants in functional box groups depending on the viewpoint 

Answer 1

Thanks for the feedback. It looks like a bug.

However, it seems to works when you remove the unquoted keyword :

@startuml
!function addService($part, $service, $as)
    !if %variable_exists($part)
        control "$service" as $as
    !endif
!endfunction

!define PART_REF

box "AWS" #LightBlue
    participant "mPlatform" as mp
    addService("PART_REF", "RefDat_MS", "rdms")
    participant "PING Access" as pa
end box

box "ApplicationZone Z5 " #LightGrey
    participant "ESP" as esp
    addService("PART2", "Service Portal", "portal")
end box
@enduml

http://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/uml/ROzDImCn48Rl-HNJMC65dWJlNR4MGMNP5OHUbcbsee5yX2HRwhytsNL5g7F9VCoyxvDjJ1ZIQ3HRoT6Af9m578QEmaa9kbdxFDt0EivrpZ1M37Aib8Jh4mQ5HqqzdLLCSLwVvoM4ioau3Novvu2nICmAP0SbMNaMQyPM0qbb2PgwVUlRtIDZHtS6Nhzt7AwUrSTdkjSZJVV5ImdbqIRWfj6Of0jciZ2-RFpz25y4-GPuI_81K__IbI8C9lBgKh5vUjr3BGJ5E6bwP9aKCix2vBrM0WltmMNamnqiZFj0NvUAkwwPb2Z-ZtTRS7uwqBYGK9UEdxCAVlstEHcD_WO0

We are going to investigate this.

Comments

IN addition

!unquoted function DRAW($x) return %set_variable_value($x, 1)

!function addBox($part, $box, $colour)
    '!ifdef $part
    !if %variable_exists($box)
        box "$box" #"$colour"
            participant "xXXX" as xx
        end box
    !endif
!endfunction

DRAW(PART25)

!ifdef PART25
title  TESTING  (Boxes & Participants)  Part25
!endif

addBox("PART25", "New Box", "white")

The function addBox doesn't seem to be outputting the expected Box and Participant

---

It seems to me that you should write it this way:

@startuml
!unquoted function DRAW($x) return %set_variable_value($x, 1)

!function addBox($part, $box, $colour)
    !if %variable_exists($part)
        box "$box" #$colour
            participant "xXXX" as xx
        end box
    !endif
!endfunction

DRAW(PART25)

!ifdef PART25
title  TESTING  (Boxes & Participants)  Part25
!endif

addBox("PART25", "New Box", "red")
@enduml

http://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/uml/HL1DImCn4BtdLxp6Lhgm5mNlhIZYfPIwuDuatSn2O4rgFZG_tqcphdD8PZBllPcNNOZAn_GvYLMoNyb5qXYJ7Q9n5a-d_VjsdHjuYibRR0B5Zs_bZJfFnCcKYDijxXeXLWjBQVteydPzOU4MwxFBV0vkSiat0XmhCsApo50s8OOAB_qQp88iN8cRcLnxSnIq6Sn5sGYP-xwNK04vBo2okeZKWLoOKPJhRqiXhkQE-rDt_r3MDwEc4RKMqSI9WExvhNizl01RDaG1jpZ-ZmqDhYN3PtqnEvTLHRQG1_e1FvNKavQDs36KV_iN

---

This is probably stretching the pre-processor design but are there ways to pass data in as a JSON or other structure array and manipulate it in a loop ? (Excuse the syntax mangling but iI hope the idea has legs)

!unquoted function DRAW($x) return %set_variable_value($x, 1)

!function addComponent($part, $component, $as)
    !if %variable_exists($part)
        participant "$component" as $as
    !endif
!endfunction

!function addBox2($part, $box, $colour, $array)
    !if %variable_exists($part)
        box "$box" #$colour
            !foreach($array[a][])
                addComponent($part, "$array[a,0]" as $array[a,1])
            !endforeach
        end box
    !endif
!endfunction

DRAW(PART25)

!ifdef PART25
title  TESTING  (Boxes & Participants)  Part25
!endif

$array[a,b]="[{XYZ,xyz},{RST, rts},{UVW, uvw}]"

addBox2("PART25", "New Box", "white" ,"$array[][]")

to get

box "New Box" #white
    participant "XYZ" as xyz
    participant "RST" as rst
    participant "UVW" as uvw
end box

---

Brillant. This is completely crazy, so yes we like the idea :-)

However, there are some specification works before going further.

So we have started a wiki discussion page http://wiki.plantuml.net/site/preprocessing-json

The wiki is completely open so please update the page to add your comments.

The idea is to propose something consistent to other users. When everybody will agree, we'll see how to implement it.

Thanks for your contribution-to-be !

---

Very nice idea

---

Some good news : we have started to work on JSON.

This is very experimental, but right now you can have http://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/uml/RO-ngeD044Nx_OhxXbUAR8eqXe3_a7HYCPgHI7Ptn3M5YF-UR8I0a7AuvywSAUF4u_JqplpzTweuOm6rwWSECnMWosCECb464ZyudKKYeK1bW8K2UqaJiUjRIL1ansCg7gp5cksfHfiTSxGhQhEQZu8fhdV1ba4x99lyUxEoTPxse8y_agrrCgM4s_kL5m00

We are currently working on "foreach" loop. We'll post a message here when this will be ready :-)

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Very good, I like this