UML Designer User's Guide


Adding a hypertext link

Since we have created an Actor element to represent the librarian, we can now indicate the relationship between this actor and the use case in which it participates. One way to do this is with a hypertext link in the use case description.

To insert a hypertext link for the Librarian actor, follow these steps:

  1. Select Use Cases in the middle pane of the Relationships Browser.
  2. Select Adding a new book to the catalog from the list of use cases.
  3. In the text pane, select the word librarian in the use case description. (You can do this with the keyboard, by swiping the mouse, or by double-clicking on the word.)
  4. Select Insert Link>Reference from the pop-up menu of the text pane. A window appears showing the different kinds of objects you can link to.
  5. In this case, the object we want to link to is an actor, so select Actor from the list. A list of available actors appears; at this point, we have only created one actor, Librarian, so no other choices appear.
  6. Select Librarian and then select OK.
  7. A window now appears verifying the label for this actor you want to appear in the text of the use case (the label of a link can be different from the name of the destination element). If you wanted to change the wording of the reference to the librarian in the use case description, you could change it here; for now, select OK to accept the default.

An actor icon Actor icon appears beside the word librarian to indicate the existence of a link to an actor in the model. You can follow this hypertext link by double-clicking on the linked word. This opens a browser on the Librarian actor.


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