Suggested Functional Improvements

[Matthew <Matthew Mailme org>]

Hey All,

I'm not a present dia developer and probably don't have the time
futuristically with University and life in general, but I thought I may
have some ideas which could be of interest to those designing on it at
the present moment.

Presently, at University I'm learning a subject called Process
Engineering and its backed heavily by Systems Analysis content. Given
that Dia is a multi-functional modelling and graphing utility I thought
I might pop some ideas in as to how a program we have been using ( ARIS
) has utilised its idea, as well as some suggestions of my own.

My 2 ideas are thus:

Decompositions of diagrams into smaller and more detailed diagrams seems
a very important feature in most modelling situations. Take older style
Data Flow Diagrams for instance? Perhaps, one feature could be to allow
Objects to be double clicked and to open up other Models? As I work with
models quite a bit, I feel this to be almost a necessary feature. Whilst
I agree you wouldn't find such features in SmarDraw or Visio, I can't
see why it wouldn't be and why this would be hard to code.
Realistically, any decent modelling project consists of many models, not
just one. Electrical Engineering? Modules into sub-modules etc?

Secondly, as ARIS has used (from what I have seen briefly), they
consider only two things. The objects or entities and the relationships
that link between them. This is probably over-the-top, but how difficult
would it be to design an editor to allow you to create such Objects and
Relationships where you can create attached property fields to them.
Then, from these individual objects and relationships you could create a
Schema out of many objects. ie... the UML Schema to which would then
represent an entire collection of objects. One model would be restricted
to one schema.

Thirdly, objects used in Models were also given Unique Identifiers
(based on the properties of that object). This allowed for the ability
to have two separate pages ( and hence, different styles of models )
where you could share the same object with the same Identifier. This
gives you some really advanced and powerful abilities. Imagine the same
object represented as one picture or entity in one model (a Person),
whilst on the other model it is represented as the same Object but with
a different portrait ( ie... a Computer ). The logic is that different
models have different perspectives though the objects may remain the
same. 

I agree some of this material may be out of scope but I figured I should
lay my opinion than not. There really are many directions you could take
this program and more than likely it would be best to stay centralised. 

This is extremely over-the-top, but another idea I just thought of...
some modelling programs allow you to traverse the model. Especially in
Process Engineering to look for bottlenecks etc, quickest paths etc. I
doubt any of this would be helpful.

Having some of these features implemented into Dia ( in my opinion )
would give great power to applications from all genres. Bloated code
maybe? But I'm no maintainer... my interest here is to suggest the
ideas, nothing more.

Have Fun! ;)