Shape inside a shape
Is there a way to put a shape inside a shape.
I would like to put a shape inside a shape the same way as creating a compartiment for attributes. Is it possible ?
Example :
Having a Square shapeI would like to put inside the square a circle or a roundedrectangle in some way that allows me connect to any shape in the diagram.Thanks
Luiz Ricci
Luiz, am I correct in my understanding that the functionality you're trying to implement would allow to drag & drop the nested small shape to another shape and this drag & drop action would start a creation of connection on the diagram? If that's the case, you would probably like to put it on the side and not inside the parent shape - is that correct?
Regards
Dmitriy Vasyura, Developer, DSL Tools Team
Hello, Luiz, Dmitriy.
If I understand well, Luiz has the same kind of scenario need that I have:
1/ create shapes inside other shapes by dragging a shape B from the toolbox to an existing shape A (and not the design surface). Of course this would request A to represent a concept that has an embedding to the concept that is represented by the dragged shape B
2/ be able to display those nested shapes (inside the border of shape A)
2/ Be able to create links between such a nested shape B and another shape either nested in A or event on the design surface or nested in another shape. Of course this link would represent a semantic relationship between those shapes
Such a scenario is similar to the nested states in UML state/activity diagrams: a state might have nested states, and transitions can also occur between a nested state and any other state.
From my opinion, it would be great if the DSL Tools could support this kind of scenario. I have a certain number of applications that demand it.
Another interesting scenario would be to be able to "open" a shape: that is to associate a new diagram to a shape A, this diagram would represent the nested shapes B of that shape. I suppose this could be possible in the future if we have support for display of partial models
Regards.
Jean-Marc Prieur
Hi Luiz,
The plan is that designers using nested shapes will be possible to build using the underlying designer APIs that we provide, but we probably won't enable this declaratively through the dsldd file. In fact, it is possible to create nested shapes today (for instance, the Whidbey Deployment Designer uses this feature) what we're lacking is a good code sample that shows how to do it. In upcoming releases, we'll be cleaning up the APIs a little bit, and producing some samples.
Thanks,
Grayson
Hi Grayson,
Have you got a good code sample to use nested shape now?
Can you produce one for us? :>
This feature will be very useful for many I suppose...
Tnx in advance
Paolo Arrigoni