Path Editor

Overview

This helper provides an easy way to create and edit path patterns for visualizing paths.

Applicable To	Visualization, Visualization Template
Menu Entry	Power Pack  Edit Path

Operation

This helper is a variant of the Context Pattern Editor – for basic operations please consult that section of the help. The following describes only the differences in the Path Editor.

The Editor

The Path Editor provides a tabular way of describing a pattern used to Visualize Paths in the Model Visualizer.

It has the same basic fields as the Context Pattern Editor with the following exceptions:

1. There is no Name column (these are only used to capture tokens as names for use in table patterns).

2. There is no Occurrence column (this concept does not exist in the Path pattern language described in Visualize Paths.

3. The Strict column only supports Strict (not very Strict).

4. The Capture column defines whether a token is hidden (it defaults to true – set it to false to hide a token from the visualization).

5. An additional Negate column allows tokens to be negated / inverted (this is enabled for Metaclass token types only)

6. The Constraint Type column has additional fields to describe inverted/negated constraints.

7. Provides an additional button “Visualize Path” – this applies the pattern and also launches the Model Visualizer on the selected Visualization*.

8. Plugin methods are defined slightly differently (see below)

· Note that when launched from this editor, the Model Visualizer does not display diagrams in tooltips. This is because the Rhapsody API is not thread-safe and trying to access a diagram image when that helper is called from this one causes Rhapsody to lock up. Launching the Model Visualizer directly does not have this problem and does display diagram images. Visualization Templates do not allow visualization as they do not directly visualize anything.

Plugin Methods

As with context patterns, Paths may employ externally defined java code to provide tokens. To define java methods in the model and make them available to the editor, add new Context Pattern Plugin Methods. These may be added to profiles or Visualization Libraries. There are two key differences:

1. In Context Pattern Plugin Methods for Paths are loaded dynamically and do not require any entry in a HEP file.

2. Because there is no HEP, the pluginName tag should refer to the JAR name instead of a plugin name.