Is it possible to infer indirect relationships in Sparx EA?

Question

I have three components, A, B and C, and I associate A to B and B to C. If I create a new diagram and drop these three components onto the diagram, EA automatically shows the relationships between the components.

If I only drop A and C on a new diagram, is there a way to get EA to show that A is associated to C without creating an explicit association between A and C?

Answer 1

Whilst this is not a default behavior in EA, and some EA practitioners even argue against such a request.

I've seen one of my client in a similar situation, where there was a need to traverse from a business process to use cases without adding the requirements on to the picture (Their usual hierarchy business process -> Requirements -> UCs) We ended up automating trace connectors creation in this particular instance. Where everytime a requirement is linked to a usecase, and if the same requirement is linked to a business process, a trace relationship is created between UC & BP.

NB - This could end up in really messy relationships, if you don't constraint it for specific purpose

Answer 2

The Associations A->B and B->C imply nothing about any potential relationship between A and C. For example, if the Association between B->C defines that B has a private attribute of type C, then A may not even know that C exists. Creating an explicit relationship is the way forward.

Answer 3

To what the other posters have said, I'll add that implicit relationships are simply not part of UML. So I don't see EA supporting it any time soon. If you really need it, Nizam Mohamed's automation suggestion will work but you can't get EA to do it out of the box.

If it's enough to see these implicit relationships on demand, you can use EA's Traceability window (under the View menu). This lets you follow relationships between elements in a tree view, so you can navigate from A to B to C.