You can attach one or more child diagrams (of any diagram type) to any symbol type in any diagram in System Architect. The diagram in which the symbol is contained becomes the parent diagram.
A child diagram generally provides greater detail of the symbol. You can create multiple-levels of decomposition. Parent-child linkages, or decompositions, are popularly used with traditional data flow diagramming techniques, functional decompositions, and with UML modeling.
System Architect automatically places a “Child Diagram” indicator above the upper-left-hand corner of any symbol that has at least one child diagram attached. The indicator is a pink downward arrow indicating that another diagram is attached to this symbol. If the text position is set outside the symbol, the pink downward arrow indicator will appear above the name of the symbol.
Multiple children and multiple parents
You can create multiple child diagrams for any symbol. For example, you can select a Use Case symbol in a Use Case diagram, and attach one or more Sequence diagrams to it. You are not restricted to a single diagram type, either. In this example, you might also attach one or more UML Activity diagrams, Data Flow diagrams, etc, to the Use Case symbol.
A diagram can also serve as a child to multiple parent symbols. So for example, you could have an Activity diagram that has as a parent a Use Case symbol on a Use Case diagram, and an Elementary Business Process symbol on a Process Chart, and so on.
Creating child diagrams
1 Open the diagram containing the symbol you want to attach the diagram to.
2 Right-click the symbol, and then click Child Create, or select the symbol and click Edit > Child Diagram > Child Create.
3 Click OK to the dialog that asks if you want to save the current diagram. You must save the current diagram at this point to create the child diagram.
Attaching an existing diagram as a child diagram to a symbol
1 Open the diagram containing the symbol you want to attach a diagram to.
2 Right‑click the symbol and select Child Attach from the drop-down list, or select the symbol and choose Child Diagram, Child Attach from the Edit menu.
3 Click OK to the dialog that asks if you want to save the current diagram. You must save the current diagram at this point to attach the child diagram.
Creating multiple children
There is no preset limit to the number of child diagrams that you can create for a given symbol.
1 Open the diagram containing the symbol you want to attach the child diagrams to.
2 Create or attach a child diagram to the selected symbol.
3 Move back to the parent diagram and choose the parent symbol again.
4 Right-click the symbol and select Child Create or Child Attach to create or attach a second child diagram. Select OK to the message that asks if the current diagram should be saved.
The second child diagram will be created and opened. To verify that there are now two children to the parent, do this:
5 Move back to the parent diagram and choose the parent symbol again.
6 Right-click the symbol and select Child Open, or select the symbol and select Edit, Go to Diagram, Child.
7 A dialog will open which shows the child diagrams attached to the parent symbol. Select a child diagram and click the Open button to open it.
Creating multiple parents
1 Right-click a symbol on an open diagram and choose Child Attach (or Child Create). Select a diagram to attach to this symbol as a child and click OK. Select OK to all dialog prompts.
2 Open a third diagram, right‑click a symbol on the diagram, and choose Child Attach (or Child Create). Select the same diagram to attach to this symbol as that selected above. Select OK to all dialog prompts. The diagram now has two parents.
3 With the child diagram open, right-mouse-click the diagram workspace and choose Parent. A dialog will open that enables you to select which parent diagram to navigate to. (Note: you can select Top to go to the highest parent diagram in a chain.)