Animating black-box sequence diagrams

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IBM® Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody® includes extended animation for sequence diagrams. Animated instance lines (classifier roles) can represent run-time objects and their internal structure (their parts) as opposed to a single, run-time object (as in previous versions). This enables you to validate higher-level sequence diagrams specified before the elaboration of the internal structure of the classes.

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Note: By default, animated instance lines in the product are mapped to single objects. To activate this feature, you must modify the property settings of the instance lines.

You can map any instance line on a sequence diagram to one of the following items:

  • A single object
  • An object and its parts
  • An object and all the objects derived from its reference sequence diagram

In addition, you can specify that during animation, messages sent from the instance line to itself are not displayed.

Two properties support this functionality:

  • Animation::ClassifierRole::DisplayMessagesToSelf determines whether messages-to-self are displayed during animation. The possible values are as follows:
    • None which means do not display any messages-to-self.
    • All which means to display all messages-to-self.
  • Animation::ClassifierRole::MappingPolicy specifies how to map instance lines during animation. The possible values are as follows:
    • Smart where the product decides the mapping policy.

      If the instance line has a reference sequence diagram, the mapping will be equivalent to ObjectAndDerivedFromRefSD; otherwise, the mapping is equivalent to ObjectAndItsParts (which, for an object without any parts, is the same as SingleObject).

    • ObjectAndItsParts where the instance line is mapped to an object and all its parts (recursively), excluding parts that are explicitly shown in the diagram.
    • SingleObject where the instance line is mapped to a single, run-time object.
    • ObjectAndDerivedFromRefSD where the instance line is mapped to an object by its role name (if it exists) and to all derived objects from the reference sequence diagrams (according to their mapping rules).
Note: If you change the values of these properties after the sequence diagram has been initialized, the changes will not take effect until you close and reopen the animated sequence diagram.