deriving activity diagram-based GUIs and CRUD them with a DB?

Question

i received a big book full of processes. i was thinking about the end user (they will be lawyers) and decided the best GUI would be showing activity diagrams or business processes. It reminded me Quickbooks and how non-accountants can successfully use it and understand accounting processes.

i began doing research before sending my project to a bunch of programmers: is there some open source solution? can i use MS Visio libraries? which UML tool is programable? what about Eclipse and its modeling tools? etc etc

the key points here are:

• relationships between events, artifacts, actors, etc should be stored in a database.
• processes or steps in a process should be easily modified by updating the database

do this sounds too crazy? (should I explain a bit more why it must be programmed this way?)

Answer 1

It doesn't sounds crazy at all :). I think it could make a wonderful product. You can achieve this quite easily(compared to the alternatives) using an existing but simple enough UML plug-in for Eclipse: AmaterasUML

How to proceed:

• You need activity diagrams, but first take a look at the sequence diagram support in this plug-in
• See the Sequence API (on the page mentioned above), and how easy is with it to generate an arbitrary sequence diagram from it.
• Take a look at that API source code (AmaterasUML is open source) and see how it's implemented.
• Now Look at the activity diagrams, and at their source code - it should be quite obvious how to implement a "Activity API" similar to how "Sequence API" is already implemented. (btw, I think the author of the plug-ing would gladly help you with this task, and it even might include that in the official plug-in).
• Now, with that working "Activity API" (that would be very similar to the Sequence API), it should be quite easy to script the read the required nodes and vertexes from a database for display.
• Even more, it should be easy to save into the database what the user is drawing with the already working visual activity diagram editor.