Setting drawing preferences

When modeling in the System Architect, you have many drawing and dialog-opening options at your disposal. Setting the preferences for your encyclopedia can help to create diagrams faster.

Use the Preferences dialog to determine how your diagrams are drawn for your encyclopedia. In this example, you will change some preferences for the Samples encyclopedia that you already have opened.

1 Select Tools > Preferences, and make sure that your choices match the dialog below.

This controls a number of options for this session of System Architect. To have the changes affect future sessions, tick the Save checkbox that is in the bottom-right corner of the dialog.

Makes System Architect automatically route lines as you draw, choosing the best and shortest path between symbols, and making sure that none are drawn over other symbols on the diagram.

You can use this feature manually, even if it not select in this dialog box: select a line or group of lines that you want to route, and then click the lightning bolt button on the Diagram toolbar.

These properties increase the size of a symbol to fit its name and its displayable information, overriding any selections you have made to the style sheet to specify the exact size of a symbol when drawn.

To specify the exact size that symbols are drawn on diagrams, click a symbol; change it size; click Format > Symbol Format > Symbol Style, and then select Set Size.

Option Auto resize in the symbol’s Display Mode must be ticked for this behavior to occur. Size is set on updating a definition edited from a symbol, on drawing a symbol, and on dragging a definition from the Explorer onto the diagram.

When you turn off horizontal and vertical resize, or if you manually adjust the size of symbols on your diagrams, you might have symbols that are not large enough to show all of their properties. Selecting this property drops a couple of bullets below every symbol on a diagram to indicate that there are more details than are visible.

Enables you to draw symbols and select other symbols without having to change to the cursor tool. To draw a symbol, click and hold the mouse button for two seconds. You can select symbols by clicking them, even though the pointer is the drawing pen.

More choices for line and symbol drawing are available in the Format > Symbol Format menu. Usually, you must have a lines or symbols selected to make choices in this menu, but you can select the line style before you draw any line.

Select Format > Symbol Format > Line. The Line Style dialog box presents you with three choices on how a line is drawn. If not already set, select the Straight, Any Orientation.

There are a number of drawing options that you can specify on a diagram-by-diagram basis, on the Format > Diagram Format menu.

The Grid & Reduced View dialog box provides options to set the grid that lines and symbols are drawn to. For maximum flexibility, clear both the symbol and line grid.

1 Select all choices in the dialog, and then click OK. The diagram workspace shows all details. Some users choose a variety of these features in which to work, such as showing rulers, or adding shadows to their symbols for presentation purposes.

The one methodology where you should be careful about adding shadows to symbols is in IDEF, where a shadowed symbol means that there is another, child diagram attached to it.

2 Select Format > Diagram Format > Display Options again, and clear all properties. Click OK.

Option Duplicate Check in Tools\Preferences turns on duplicate checking in general.

Option Duplicate checking in the Symbol Style dialog for a particular symbol type must be ticked before System Architect will prevent drawing of duplicate symbols.

Duplicate checking is always on for:

▪Class, Use Case, Object, Port and Package symbols in UML 2.0 diagrams.

2 In this dialog, you can select or clear options to display terminators (cardinality notations at the line endpoints), or to draw a line from an association to its name, whenever the association’s name strays from the line by a certain amount (see Line to Remote Name choices).