Hi,

I'm loving OmniGraffle's simplicity and flexibility, but it's falling down a bit for me when it comes to UML sequence diagrams.

The main issue I have been running into is that the objects from the stencil have perhaps 4 magnets to a side, spaced at regular intervals. When you try to hook up one communication to another, the arrows are inevitably crooked. If you somehow get them all straight and level with the page (that is, perfectly horizontal), if you need to grow the box for one component to accomodate more messages, you then make all the current messages crooked again.

Is there anyway to make the rectangle used in the sequence stencil one big magnet? That is, anything attached to it would just slide up and down the rectangle and find a horizontal position with the other point?

I know other tools handle this issue by managing UML Sequence diagrams for you--that is, you aren't just drawing anymore, but doing it in a mediated way. This allows them to place the messages in order, etc. I don't know how you would get OmniGraffle to do what I described. But if there is a way, you would make my life very nice :-)

Matt

[krustyfur]

I had the same issue, the only way I got around it was to turn off the setting that connected lines to those boxes while I was doing the bulk of the initial design. I know this defeats the purpose of the tool for the most part, but it was less work than constantly moving every single magnet when I resized a box.

[dpk]

I know this is an old post, but I searched around for other "UML Sequence" questions, finding none. Has anyone been able to figure out a way to create horizontal lines between UML Sequence boxes that does not require you to manually position the lines pixel by pixel?

I'd love to show you what I am talking about, but this forum makes it hard for people to post URLs. Search for "a quick introduction to uml sequence diagrams" and click on the tracemodeler.com link. I'm looking for that example diagram, without the blue trace line.

What I end up with instead can be found at 4yHA5.png on i.imgur.com. Two separate arrows, overlapping because of some automatic behavior.

I am using OmniGrafffle Pro 5.3.6, on OS X 10.7.