Note that using special shapes that are specific to a particular diagram
type has its uses. At some point in the future, I would like to see a
generic scripting interface to dia which would allow walking over the
diagram and looking at all the objects and connections. By using the
appropriate object types, a program can make much more sense out of the
diagram.
One possible use would be to actually add code generation features for the
UML diagram objects. By using the standard line types and just changing
line styles and arrows, such a program may not be able to reliably
generate code.
I do agree that there is quite a bit of code duplication in dia, which
makes it difficult to fix bugs (one bug in some of my objects was
replicated in about 4 places :( This is one of the reasons I wrote the
custom shape code -- do all the C code once and get it correct. Then
write small XML files to describe individual shapes.
Maybe doing something similar for lines would be useful (not necessarily
using XML to describe things). Maybe having some generic line objects,
and being able to override just the methods you need to (ie. maybe leave
some members blank, and call some function to fill in the blanks in the
ObjectOps/ObjectTypeOps structures.
James.
--
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WWW: http://www.daa.com.au/~james/
On Sat, 30 Oct 1999, Cyrille Chepelov (home) wrote:
> Of course, dia is great at building UML diagrams. Now, not everyone does
> UML modeling, and dia doesn't claim to be an UML modeling tool (for which
> it would dearly lack a code generator) but a generic, top-notch diagram
> editor (which, in the specific case of UML, it is).
