Display of Custom Properties on Capella Diagrams

Capella
1

Our team would like to create and display custom properties on the diagrams themselves within the graphic they are related to.

For instance, if we have a system tree for system components, we want to assign and display a “responsible party” for that system (very similar to if we were defining classes and we were creating methods and properties for those classes). Can someone help me do this?

And no, we don’t want to clutter up the drawing with additional notes.

2

Hi Matt,
I see 2 options here:

  • option 1: you use the PVMT add-on, enabling you to extend the Capella data model with property-values. There are 2 drawbacks:
    • (1) you will be limited in how you will display the information on the diagrams: you will be limited to:
      • either having a different color for components based on the value you have (like green is for responsible party 1, blue for responsible party 2…)
      • or display property value as boxes attached to each component (classical way of displaying Property-values in Capella
    • (2) if you have big models and big diagrams, you may experience some performance issues with PVMT
  • Option 2: we already did these kind of Capella extensions (viewpoints) for customers, where we extend the Capella data model with new attributes and enrich the diagrams with custom ways of displaying the information - please contact me if you’re interested in learning more about it

Stephane Lacrampe
ObeoSoft Canada

3

So to make sure I’m understanding, we can add additional/custom properties, but we can’t display on them on diagrams unless we add more boxes (showing the property value boxes) or letting the property drive an appearance like a color.

If I go with having the properties drive the colors, is that an automatic thing or is this just assign the property and manually change the color for the boxes to represent the property value? Also, is there an automated way to generate a legend to explain the colors?

4

I view displaying the property boxes as exactly like just adding notes and would amount to over-cluttering drawings when we are just trying to display custom properties within the boxes of the objects they are associated with (what using a sysml tool would give you out of the box). Is this something being planned to be updated in the future (I’m assuming I’m not the only one that has asked this question or has this need).

5

Replying to your question “to make sure I’m understanding”: Yes, and it is an “automatic thing” once you activate the “diagramStyler” layer on the diagram where you want these colors to apply - if you want to learn more on PVMT, you can watch this webinar: Easily enrich Capella models with your domain extensions (by Thales) | Webinar Capella - YouTube

“Is there an automated way to generate a legend to explain the colors?” → not really an 'automated way", you can configure yourself the colors, and maybe one way to generate a legend would be to use the “title blocks” on your diagram object displaying an image with the legend.

To my knowledge, I am not aware of anything planned on having property-values displayed “as in SysML” but contributions are always welcome, I suppose.