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Support conditionals and loops in dynamic views #115
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The C4 model and Structurizr tooling are designed to be simple, and cater for "a majority" audience. What you're asking for takes you across that line, and into the realms of UML. If you need such features, I think you may have outgrown the tooling, and you're likely better off using UML directly given its much richer semantics. |
Thanks Simon. I do see the benefits of modeling that behavior with Structurizr, as it would let me separate it from the diagramming tool used to represent it. But I also fully understand you reject those features if they are out of scope of C4 model and Structurizr. I think I got confused because I found parallel sequences in scope and, then, I didn't think conditions/loops are out of scope. What are the key differences between them to let first be accepted while second are not? |
The parallel sequence support really does nothing more than reuse the same sequence numbers, and I added it to provide a simple way to show parallel activities with the Structurizr cloud service/on-premises installation/Lite. I did look at making this more sophisticated (e.g. supporting nested hierarchical numbering, like UML does), but the UML specification for this is quite long and not particularly straightforward. So what we have at the moment is a "it's enough for most people" approach. Translating dynamic views to PlantUML/WebSequenceDiagrams/etc requires a stricter set of semantics. It also requires more information than what's captured in the current version of the Structurizr workspace to do this, because the workspace doesn't include any information about these parallel sequences. If you look at the JSON for the dynamic views, you'll see that each relationship has a sequence number (named |
I'm not dropping Structurizr to adopt UML, but the other way around. No intention at all to move back to UML.
If you have any advice, I would appreciate it :) . Thanks! |
Yes, using UML directly will be the best option if you need more preciseness and semantics than what the C4 model/Structurizr provides. For suggestions, off the top of my head:
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Thank you! |
Hi Simon. Question about approach 2: As you pointed to, and also documented in the DSL language reference, we can only use the identifiers in the DSL-based workspace or in another DSL-based workspace extending the original one. Once a DSL-based workspace is parsed, those identifiers are gone and cannot be used anymore to reference to the elements. Is it a decision part of the design? Or maybe a current limitation that could be fixed? |
Correct, the DSL identifiers are only used while the DSL is being parsed, and they're not retained in the JSON version of the workspace. I have no plans to change this. |
Is there any possible workaround? Can I create a script or plugin to, for example, add a custom property on the element to keep track on the identifier used in DSL? |
Unfortunately not. And things like implied relationships are not assigned identifiers during DSL processing, so there would likely be some identifiers missing too. |
What if StructurizrDslParser allows getting access to the identifier register after parsing? I believe it would let me use same DSL identifiers in PlantUML code, as I would be able to get elements in the model with those identifiers to peform required actions to validate against the model and properly render elements. What do you think? |
Sure, I can add a public getter for the identifiers register. |
Great! Thank you! |
Nowadays dynamic views support parallel sequences.
It would be great if they also support conditionals and loops, so we can communicate those type of dynamic behavior accordingly.
Given this example:
Let’s suppose getting Additional Data is only required under some condition in Core data (conditional), and Core data include a list of Parts, which requires getting Part data for each part separately (Looping)
Nowadays there is no way to communicate that behavior as part of the dynamic view.
I believe a Communication Diagram generated from that dynamic view could support representing it based on Guards on messages. On the other hand, PlantUML (and probably others) sequence diagrams support those concepts by “opt”, “alt/else” and “loop” messaging blocks.
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