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The interaction diagramming tool will automatically create interaction
diagrams from your running VisualWorks program. You can select which classes you
want to view, execute your code, and then have the tool automatically build an
interaction diagram of your code.
The interaction diagramming tool was originally a project done by David
Wheeler, Jeff Will, and Jinghu Xu for Prof. Johnson's CS497 class. I rewrote the
display code so that it could handle thousands of events (using interval trees),
and refactored some of the recording to be more robust.
To install the interaction-diagramming tool, you need to parcel-in the
InteractionDiagram.pcl file.
To run the tool, choose the "Interaction Diagram" option from the
"Tools" menu on the launcher. This will open a window similar to the picture above. After
opening the window, the first thing you'll need to do is to select some methods
to watch. For example, you might want to select all methods in the "Browser*"
categories. Once you have selected the methods you want, you need to "Install"
the wrappers. Now you need to execute some to generate some events. If you
installed the wrappers on the Browser* categories, then you might want to open
a RefactoringBrowser (i.e., "RefactoringBrowser open"). After you
have generated some events, you'll need to uninstall the wrappers. When you
uninstall the wrappers, the diagram will update with the events you generated.
Reading the results: the diagrams generated by the tool are similar to
the interaction diagrams seen in many books, but there is one notable exception.
Since we only select a few methods to observe, we miss some messages. As a
result, there are times when a message is received, but the last method entered
did not send the message. For example, suppose you have:
Foo>>createBar
^Bar new
Bar>>initialize
"do some initialization"
Bar class>>new
^super new initialize
and that you only wrap Foo>>createBar and Bar>>initialize.
If you send a Foo the createBar message, that event
will be recorded. It will send the new message to Bar
class, but since that method is not wrapped, it is not observed. When the
new method sends the initialize method to a Bar,
it is observed, but the last observed method did not send it. Such events are
called indirect message sends and are displayed as yellow lines. In the picture
above, we can see that "a RefactoringBrowser" sent a closed message
to some object that wasn't wrapped, which resulted in the update:with:from:
method being called on "(nothing selected)" (a CodeModel).
There are several features that could be added to the interaction diagramming
tool. If you want a feature, you can
send me
email, but the quickest way to have the feature implemented might be to do
it yourself. Since I have several
other projects, I cannot dedicate too much time to improving the diagramming
tool. I can provide email support for you to implement the feature. Once you
have completed the feature, you should submit it so that everyone can use it.
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