The Relationships Browser is the heart of UML Designer; you can use it
to browse and edit all of your model elements, and it has sophisticated
filtering capabilities that can help you work with the kinds of elements and
relationships you're interested in.
With the default settings, the Relationships Browser has three panes. The leftmost pane shows the available source elements; the source element is the starting point for navigating in the browser. If you opened the browser from the Transcript window, the leftmost pane lists all of the models in your image, and you can select any one of them as the current source element.
When you select a source element, the middle pane of the Relationships Browser then shows a list of possible relationships between that element and other elements. For example, if you select a model in the leftmost pane, the middle pane shows a list of relationships between the model and the elements it contains, such as class designs, diagrams, use cases, and requirements. These relationships are the predefined relationship types defined by the UML Designer metamodel.
The drop-down list at the bottom of the middle pane selects the relationship filter used to control which of the possible relationships are shown. Some types of model elements have a large number of possible relationships, so this filter is useful for viewing a subset of them. The default relationship filter is Interesting Relationships, which shows only the most useful relationships; most of the time, you can leave the filter set to this setting. Other settings can show other subsets of the possible relationships, or all of the possible relationships.
Note: | The relationship filter is cumulative with other UML Designer filtering options, which are available from the menu bar. See Filtering for more information. |
The bottom pane of the Relationships Browser is the hypertext pane. This pane contains any descriptive text that applies to the model, relationship, or model element currently selected. You can use the hypertext pane to write explanatory text describing each element; the text can include hypertext links to other related model elements.
When you select one of the relationships from the middle pane, the rightmost pane shows all of the model elements that result from following the selected relationship from the selected source element. For example, if you select Library Catalog in the leftmost pane and Class Diagrams in the middle pane, the rightmost pane lists all of the class diagrams defined in the Library Catalog model.