New Role Features

Highlighting

One of the more prevalent complaints about old versions of AcmeStudio was the difficulty many users had in ‘being on’ their target when dragging roles around.  If a model was quite zoomed out or sufficiently large, connecting the end of a role to the desired target was not an easy task.  As such, the same kind of highlighting displayed with connections is used for role dragging, to attempt to make it clear to users the objects they are over.

Connection Functionality

To make it easier for users to easily connect existing roles to components, AcmeStudio has been enhanced with the functionality to allow users to drag roles to a component, release the mouse button, and have AcmeStudio automatically create a port on the component and connect the role to it.  What port type will be created?  Well, there is a new property in diagram preferences which lets the user choose whether role dragging will be governed by connection patterns.  If this choice is made, then, should a connection pattern match with the connector type the role is connected to, the role type, and the component type, it will be used to infer the port type.  Should there be more than one matching pattern, a wizard will be displayed asking the user to disambiguate the type.

If the user has deselected the property relating role dragging to be governed by connection patterns, then dragging a role to any component type will be allowed, and the user will simply be presented with a dialog to select from all of the different port types.