I highly recommend downloading EditPlus (you can keep using it for free, perpetually, if you’re a cheap bastard or pony up the $20 for such an awesome editor). It actually makes working with sequence diagrams, beyond just whiteboarding, much more useful and much more productive as it lets you kind of think out the code by actually writing pseudocode. Notes stay in their context if you add a step since everything gets pushed down. Reordering actors involves moving your participant declarations around. Moving objects around becomes a matter of moving lines of text. I know what you’re thinking: Chuck, that looks like code! By golly, it does! And - at least to me - that’s the beauty all of a sudden, a frustrating, time consuming, mouse-centric activity becomes a keyboard-centric, coding-like activity. The first step was to create a syntax and auto-complete file so that it was a little more user-friendly. While doing it in the browser is fine, I found it much easier to do it in EditPlus, my text editor of choice. I can’t speak to the console program or the DLL (yet), but I decided that the only way that I could do this right was to do it in WSD first and then just use Visio to render the final output. Maybe if it’s a final product and you don’t plan on touching it ever again and you’ve already done most of the work on paper or something, but it’s a terrible tool if you’re just trying to think an idea out and see it visually. So yeah, all in all, I’m not sure why anyone would want to subject themselves to the pain of creating sequence diagrams in Visio. I mean, this seamed like pretty basic stuff to me. You can’t actually CTRL+click two lifelines, as one would think you’d be able to do, and drag them both to extend them simultaneously. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to get the lifelines to synchronize in length so I didn’t have to manually go back and drag each one down to the same length. That meant that I had to keep moving notes around as I changed activations and modified connection points. The notes don’t seem to anchor to anything and it’s not clear to me how that’s supposed to work. I had to keep managing the location of notes. What made this even more annoying was that having the rectangle, even though I sent it to the back, then made it difficult to select elements that were enclosed by the rectangle like a message line or a connection point or a note I’d end up selecting this stupid rectangle instead. I ended up having to draw a rectangle and manually managing the size of it as I changed steps and added more steps. There was no representation of alternate paths or optional steps. This is an incomprehensible design flaw I have no idea how people work around this in Visio since I adjust activations multiple times as I’m working through a diagram. I probably spent a good 10% of my time simply fixing these connection points as a adjusted activations: This was absolutely mindboggling: if I extended an activation, it would cause the first connection on the activation to jump, which would then require me to manually drag the connection back to where it belonged. What’s worse is that you end up having to scroll around horizontally (reordering actors) and vertically (reordering steps) while dragging a bunch of stuff around. There’s simply no easy way to do it aside from zooming out, grabbing everything to the right and shifting it around while counting gridlines and getting your result some 10-20 clicks later. Want to add a new step? What about introducing a new actor in between two existing actors? Prepare for some carpal tunnel my friend. You’d think that Visio would be smart enough to do this, but it isn’t… This was annoying since it also involved then zooming out so that I could select everything and reposition it to the top left corner of the page then zooming back in. But as I started to build my sequence up, I found that I had to keep toggling around with the paper size just so that I would have a grid. By default, you can’t really fit much on the page. One could argue that this calls for a refactoring of the diagram in the first place, but then I would say that you’ve never tried to actually refactor a Visio diagram…I still find it hard to believe: the activation box ran out of connection points I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it myself: Yes, it’s possible for a long activation sequence, you can actually run out of connection points. I’ve blogged about it previously, but I’ve only come to truly appreciate it after having to use Visio for a few days before I convinced the client that I could deliver the content faster and in an easier to maintain format (well, text) using WSD. As I’ve been working with a client which has demanded rigorous sequence diagrams as deliverables for the design phase of the project, I’ve started to use more and more.
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