Element Properties : Understanding Elements : Chart Elements

Chart Elements

Rational Statemate supports the chart elements described in the following table:

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Describes the system's behavior over time, including the dynamics of activities, their control and timing behavior, the states and modes of the system, and the conditions and events that cause modes to change and other occurrences to take place. It thus also provides answers to questions about causality, concurrency and synchronization.
Statecharts constitute an extensive generalization of state-transition diagrams. They allow for multi-level states, decomposed in an and/or fashion, and thus support economical specification of concurrency and encapsulation. They incorporate a broadcast communication mechanism, timeout and delay operators for specifying synchronization and timing information, and a means for specifying transitions that depend on the history of the system's behavior.
Each element in the statechart has properties, which can contain additional information. For example, an event element can be used to define a compound event by an expression involving other events and conditions.
Describes the functional view of the system using activities as the primary building block. This is sometimes referred to as the process-oriented view. A system description can contain one or more activity charts. Activity charts, which can be connected to module charts, describe the functionality of individual modules.
Activity charts can be connected to statecharts. Statecharts either define the behavior of individual activities or control groups of activities as a control activity.
Illustrates – at a very high level – the relationship between “actors” (whoever or whatever interacts with the system being designed) and the system itself.
They provide a natural high-level view of the intended external functionality of the system that is understandable by engineers and non-engineers alike.
Represents a process graphically. A flowchart represents the entire process from start to finish, showing inputs, pathways and circuits, and action or decision points.
Describes the structural view of the system using modules as the primary building block. A system description can contain one or more module charts. Module charts are at the top of the chart hierarchy in a system model.
Contains definitions of user-defined types as well as constant data items and conditions. The elements that appear in a GDS are visible in the entire model. Data types defined in a chart or inherited from a parent chart take precedence over data types defined in a GDS.
A GDS is similar to a chart in that both are configuration items of the model. That is, both charts and GDSs contain parts of the model and can be saved and loaded separately from other parts. A GDS cannot contain any other graphical or non-graphical information.
There can be several GDS’s in one model, but there is no hierarchical relationship between them, or between them and the charts in the model.
The GDS Visibility feature enables you to control the usage of definitions in a Global Definition Set (GDS) and to restrict their visibility. It allows the integration of some independent developed models, without having to worry about collisions between “global” variables and types, defined in each one of the different subsystems

The relationships between each supported chart and possible chart uses (generic/regular/procedural) are shown in following table.

 
Generic - Generic charts enable reuse of parts of a specification. A generic chart makes it possible to represent common portions of the model as a single chart that can be instantiated in many places, and in this it is similar to a procedure in a conventional programming language.
Regular - A non-generic chart.
Procedural - A Procedural Statechart is a specialized derivative of a statechart, which is used as a possible implementation of a Subroutine.
Generic - Generic charts enable reuse of parts of a specification. A generic chart makes it possible to represent common portions of the model as a single chart that can be instantiated in many places, and in this it is similar to a procedure in a conventional programming language.
Regular - A non-generic chart.
Regular - A non-generic chart.
Regular - A non-generic chart.
Generic - Generic charts enable reuse of parts of a specification. A generic chart makes it possible to represent common portions of the model as a single chart that can be instantiated in many places, and in this it is similar to a procedure in a conventional programming language.
Regular - A non-generic chart.
Procedural - A Procedural Flowchart is a specialized derivative of a Flowchart, which is used as a possible implementation of a Subroutine.
Generic - Generic charts enable reuse of parts of a specification. A generic chart makes it possible to represent common portions of the model as a single chart that can be instantiated in many places, and in this it is similar to a procedure in a conventional programming language.
Regular - A non-generic chart.