Wednesday, 27 July 2011

No send action on Visio 2007 activity diagram signal shapes

One thing that’s not intuitive in Visio 2007 is how to change the text on a UML activity diagram signal element. When you first drag the signal shape on to an activity diagram it displays the text “<no send action>”.

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No amount of editing properties will change that unless you do some thing like the following:

1. Create a new Static Structure Diagram (if you haven’t got one already).

2. Using the UML Static Structure shape palette drag a new Signal on to the Static Structure Diagram.

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3. Right-click on the signal and open Properties.

4. Change the Name to whatever you want to signal to be called.

5. Return to your Activity Diagram and using the UML Activity Diagram palette add a Signal to your activity diagram.

6. Right-click on the signal and open Properties.

7. Choose Actions from the left-hand pane.

8. Select the Send Action and choose Properties.

9. Under Send Action you can now see the signal you added to the Static Structure diagram in the Signal drop down. Select it.

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10. OK to all the dialogs and now the name of the signal appears on your signal shape.

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Intuitive, isn’t it!

Monday, 25 July 2011

Renaming files with PowerShell

Problem: I had a directory full of PDF files that needed renaming. Specifically, I had to remove part of each file name.

Solution: Let’s try PowerShell!

PowerShell has been sitting on my machine for ages but for some reason I haven’t got around to using it. This seemed like a great opportunity to get my feet wet and – happily - this example turned out to be very straight forward. Firstly, I discovered that PowerShell was installed to C:\WINDOWS\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0 and I checked that the directory was in my Path system environment variable.

I launched Console2  - it’s so much more fun than using the standard Windows command prompt – and changed directory to the one holding the files I wanted to rename. I then ran powershell.exe which brought up the PowerShell command prompt and used the following PowerShell command to rename the files in the current directory:

get-childitem *.pdf | foreach{rename-item $_ $_.Name.Replace("text to replace", "")}

 

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That was it. The files were renamed replacing “text to replace” with an empty string.

References