The Drawing Tool

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The Drawing Tool

The Drawing Tool allows the creation of a wide variety of architectural schematics and diagrams. Architects traditionally use a range of different drawings to record and convey the design of an architecture. Two-dimensional (2D) diagrams are the usual way of documenting and communicating various parts of a system. Typical drawings types used in enterprise systems are:

•Business process models and diagrams;

•Organisation charts;

•Collaboration diagrams;

•Entity-Relationship (ER) diagrams;

•Data-Flow Diagrams (DFD's);

•Class diagrams;

•IDEF (incorporating several of the above); and

•UML (incorporating several of the above).

There really is no limit to the kinds of diagrams that can be created. ABACUS tries to balance diagram flexibility while preserving the integrity of the architecture and its forms of representation.

The drawing environment is a tabbed and dockable window inside the main ABACUS application. This window contains a canvas where the drawing takes place and when the drawing window is open a second dockable window, the stencil window, is viewable with a set of drawing stencils. The stencil pane has 4 tabs: Components, Connections, Shapes and Connectors. The canvas appears as a white background with fine grid lines (helpful for layout).

Components are represented by a range of shapes, while connections are drawn as directed lines. Connections attach to components using roles (i.e. either Source or Sink) although these are not shown for aesthetic reasons.

Tip

While diagrams are very useful for showing different parts of a system, they are limited in their scalability, which is why ABACUS uses 3D to visualise complex system structures.

You may want to

1.Open the Diagramming Tool

2.Create a new diagram of part of a your architecture

3.Copy a diagram within or across architectures

4.Add components to a diagram

5.Create new components and connections in your architecture (diagrammatically) using the drawing tool

6.Delete components from a diagram

7.Attach & manipulate connections

8.Change the display properties of components and connections.

9.Using links in diagram

10.Enforce type associations and viewpoints so as to restrict the types of diagrams that can be drawn.