Class Diagrams and Generic collections

sgraham posted on Wednesday, July 11, 2007

I'm trying to visualize my somewhat complicated project via Visual Studio Class Diagrams.

First off, the association that my business root contains a child collection is not represented.  I have to manually choose to "Show as Association" for each property to make the representation accurate.  It's a pain but it's feasible.  Does anybody know a global method of changing these (assuming the children are classes defined in my project since you obviously would not want that functionality for .NET framework types)?

More importantly, I'm noticing that there is no visual association between my child collection and my child object.  Further, I can't seem to manually provide one (without changing the code - which I don't want to do).  Is this a limitation where the class designer hasn't caught up to the framework (regarding generics)?  Or am I missing something else?

I understand this may not be specifically a CSLA question but any CSLA user wishing to see visual representation of their class diagram has surely seen this issue.

Thanks!

DansDreams replied on Thursday, July 12, 2007

I was VERY excited about the class designer when I first looked at it, especially given the apparent bulls-eye on the round-tripping aspects.  But I quickly found it to be really inadequate for a complex solution like we're building with CSLA.  I don't remember all the details, but the general feel of what you describe sounds familiar.