Visio 2010 UML Object Lifeline renames itself when a Message is deleted

Question

I'm doing a lot of documentation for the way our systems interact with other systems and am using the UML Sequence Diagram (Metrics US) shapes that come with Visio 2010. When I use them, I have the following problem:

I create an object lifeline and name it 'X' then i add another object lifeline and name it 'y'. I add a Message from 'X' to 'Y'. This is all fine up to this point. BUT if I delete the Message that connects 'X' to 'Y', the object lifelines rename themselves to Object1 and Object2. You can imagine how annoying this is when you have about 10 different object lifelines and the fool thing decides to rename your all of your lifelines because of a deleted message!

I couldn't figure out why it was happening in the Developer tools section of visio either (though I'm by no means a Visio dev)

Visio 2010 Premium v. 14.0.5128.5000

Anyone have any insights?

Cyanate

BTW, i also tried this in Visio 2003, this is also an issue with it. Also updated to SP1 with Visio 2010 and it STILL is an issue. This seems to be a long running problem. (also, Visio 2003 and Visio 2010 are on different PCs) – Cyanate

Answer 1

For anyone having the same problem, I think I kind of found out what is causing it. If you rename an object by simply pressing F2, the problem occurs. However, if you rename it by double-clicking and entering the name, the problem disappears (at least so far).

Tilford

This solved it for me. It seems the F2 renaming capability is a hangover from normal stencil shapes and gets overwritten at every opportunity by the Visio UML data model. – Manualmanubrium

Answer 2

I got this problem when doing cut and paste inside UML. So I disabled Tools/Options/Advanced/Automation Events. Of course, some actions must then not occur, but regarding the poor reliability of Visio UML, I don't care, I just use it for drawing and will go to a real UML tool if I need it. And it's possible to re-enable it after.

Olivier

Hydria

Answer 3

It seems to have something with the way you enter names to the objects. See here for additional info. Anyways the built in Visio UML stencils are awful at best I prefer using Pavel Hruby's UML stencils.

Inexpedient