Shape inside a shape

Shape inside a shape

• Taylor Brown

  Hello, Luiz, Dmitriy.
  
  If I understand well, Luiz has the same kind of scenario need that I have:
  1/ create shapes inside other shapes by dragging a shape B from the toolbox to an existing shape A (and not the design surface). Of course this would request A to represent a concept that has an embedding to the concept that is represented by the dragged shape B
  2/ be able to display those nested shapes (inside the border of shape A)
  2/ Be able to create links between such a nested shape B and another shape either nested in A or event on the design surface or nested in another shape. Of course this link would represent a semantic relationship between those shapes
  
  Such a scenario is similar to the nested states in UML state/activity diagrams: a state might have nested states, and transitions can also occur between  a nested state and any other state.
  
  From my opinion, it would be great if the DSL Tools could support this kind of scenario. I have a certain number of applications that demand it.
  
  Another interesting scenario would be to be able to "open" a shape: that is to associate a new diagram to a shape A, this diagram would represent the nested shapes B of that shape. I suppose this could be possible in the future if we have support for display of partial models
  
  Regards.
  Jean-Marc Prieur
  

• pietpeters

  Hi Dmitriy, Jean
  
  The scenario I need is exactly what Jean wrote. I must put shapes inside existing shapes and also I need to know which shape is above the other. Every shape can be associated (linked)  to any other shape in the model and also be liked with itself or to the shape it are in.
  
  Is it possible
  
  thanks
  
  

  
  
  

• SathikKhan

  Alan, Dmitriy  
  Will this feature be possible in next release 
  
  Thanks.
  
  

• simonoch

  Luiz, am I correct in my understanding that the functionality you're trying to implement would allow to drag & drop the nested small shape to another shape and this drag & drop action would start a creation of connection on the diagram If that's the case, you would probably like to put it on the side and not inside the parent shape - is that correct
  
  Regards
  Dmitriy Vasyura, Developer, DSL Tools Team
  

• wzaqma

  Hi Luiz,
  
  The plan is that designers using nested shapes will be possible to build using the underlying designer APIs that we provide, but we probably won't enable this declaratively through the dsldd file.  In fact, it is possible to create nested shapes today (for instance, the Whidbey Deployment Designer uses this feature) what we're lacking is a good code sample that shows how to do it.  In upcoming releases, we'll be cleaning up the APIs a little bit, and producing some samples.
  
  Thanks,
  Grayson
  

• Paul Marriott

  There is some functionality that approximates to this in the Examples.Customizations ActivityDiagrams example that comes in the VS SDK samples folder. But it will be easier to do in the next release.

  Alan

  
  
  

• shanku

  Hi Grayson,
  Have you got a good code sample to use nested shape now
  Can you produce one for us :>
  This feature will be very useful for many I suppose...
  
  Tnx in advance
  
  Paolo Arrigoni
  
  
  
  
  
• Shape inside a shape