Working With Actors and Use Cases

Use Case diagrams are useful for showing the behavior of a system from the standpoint of a user, functional description, and graphic description of who will use a system. The UML Modeling feature enables you to do the following:

Adding Actors

You can quickly populate a diagram with Actors. First, be sure the diagram you want populated is open in the Diagram editor.

  1. In the Modeling Palette, click the Actor icon Actor icon.
  2. Click anywhere in the diagram.
    The IDE adds an Actor to the diagram.

Adding Use Cases

You can also populate diagrams quickly with Use Cases.

  1. In the Modeling Palette, click the Use Case icon Use Case icon.
  2. Click anywhere in the diagram.
    The IDE adds a Use Case to the diagram.

Adding Associations

  1. In the Context Palette, click the Association icon Association icon.
  2. In the diagram, drag from one Actor to another, or drag between multiple Use Cases.
    The IDE links the elements, and displays them and their relationships among the Actors and Use Case nodes in the Projects window.

Graphic showing the use of the Association component to connect the use cases to Actors

Connecting Actors and Use Cases

You can use the Context Palette to quickly connect Actors and Use Cases.

  1. In the Context Palette, click the Association icon Association icon.
  2. In the diagram, click an Actor and then drag to one or more Use Cases.
    The IDE connects the Actor with the Use Case(s).

Using the Association link to connect actors to use cases


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