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Hello World: Rational Software Architect

Design a simple phone book application

Tinny Ng (tng@ca.ibm.com), Advisory Software Developer, IBM Toronto

Tinny Ng is a scenario architect at the IBM SWG Scenario Analysis Lab, whose mission is to improve the cross-brand integration capability of IBM SWG products. She has more than 10 years of experience in software development, from design to implementation, including application building, packaging, testing, and support.
(An IBM developerWorks Contributing Author)

Summary: Welcome to the first tutorial in the "Hello, World! Series", which will provide high-level overviews of various IBM software products. This tutorial introduces you to IBM Rational Software Architect, and highlights some basic features of Rational Software Architect with a hands-on exercise. Learn how to design an application using UML diagrams, publish the model information into a Web page, and transform the design to Java code using Rational Software Architect.

View more content in this series

Date: 05 May 2006
Level: Introductory
PDF: A4 and Letter (703 KB | 24 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 44849 views
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Creating a sequence diagram

A sequence diagram in UML shows the chronological sequence of messages between instances in an interaction. It consists of an interaction that is represented by lifelines and the messages that they exchange over time during the interaction.

In this section you're going to realize the use case "Search for a phone number" and show the associated interaction using a sequence diagram. The use case starts with the actor Any User, who makes use of the interface provided by PhoneBookView to request a search. PhoneBookView notifies PhoneBookController about the user's request. PhoneBookController then updates the data model that is stored in PhoneBookModel. Because there is a change of the model, PhoneBookModel notifies PhoneBookView, which should then refresh the user interface to reflect the latest state of the application.

In the Model Explorer view, right-click Phone Book UML Model and select Add Diagram > Sequence Diagram.
Enter Sequence Diagram as the name of the generated diagram to replace the default name Diagram1.
Drag the actor Any User from the Model Explorer view to the diagram to create an instance of the actor, as shown in Figure 10. Similarly, create instances of PhoneBookView, PhoneBookController and PhoneBookModel by dragging them to the diagram.

Figure 10. Drag the model elements to the sequence diagram
Select Asynchronous Message in the Palette. As shown in Figure 11, click the line under any User: Any User and then the line under phoneBookView:PhoneBookView.

Figure 11. Create message line
Select the operation PhoneBookView::getUserInput() from the drop down list.

Figure 12. Select operation for a message line

Similarly, create the following Asynchronous Message lines shown in Table 3. To create an Asynchronous Message to call itself, simply click the instance bar directly without any dragging.

Table 3. Message lines for the sequence diagram

From instance	To instance	Operation
phoneBookView	phoneBookController	PhoneBookController::userHasInput()
phoneBookController	phoneBookModel	PhoneBookModel::searchPhoneNumber()
phoneBookController	phoneBookModel	PhoneBookModel::setState()
phoneBookModel	phoneBookView	PhoneBookView::stateHasChanged()
phoneBookView	phoneBookModel	PhoneBookModel::getSearchResult()
phoneBookView	phoneBookView	PhoneBookView::changeView()

The complete sequence diagram should look like Figure 13. Select File > Save All to save everything.

Figure 13. Complete sequence diagram