Re: Carriage return in UML class diagram

[Luc Pionchon <luc handhelds org>]

On Mon, 2004-03-15 at 14:55, Philipp Zehnder wrote:
> Hello

Hi!

> Is it possible to insert carriage returns in a UML class diagram? The

Unfortunatly you cannot currently.

> point is that when methods have a long list of arguments, then the box
> gets extremely wide. Therefore it would be nice if one could split a
> method or at least the arguments on several lines.

This is right. All examples in UML books have very short names and very
few arguments, which makes the class diagrams very pretty... But real
life examples are sometimes very different.

If I remember right, Rational Rose is cutting the long lines and adds
"(...)" at the end, and a tooltip shows the full string. But then I do
not remember how it behaves when printting a diagram.

How do you think it should behave?

Should the class object be resizable? Then the size is a constraint for
each entry and every longer method/attribute would be automatically
splitted? Maybe an option could allow to say "auto resize"? Or the
opposite "allow free resizing", so dia keeps by default its current
behavior?

It would also be nice to be able to edit freely each entry (method or
attribute), a bit like in a file selector, where you can either select
your file with the GUI, either enter the path by hand:
if I type "+ foo(bar: int, bbar: double )"
it would fill up the fields "public" "foo" "bar" "int" "bbar" "double"
Then one could also insert CR, as we would do when writing code.


Maybe you would like to implement such feature,
many verbose UML writers would certainly be grateful!

luc
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