How to show duplicate actions in an activity diagram?

Question

I'm working on an activity diagram that has a decision node. First action is "review application" then it goes into the decision node. This splits into accepted or rejected. On both cases, I need to add "Update audit trail" and "notify user" actions. And then the flow goes to the final node.

The "Update audit trail" and "notify user" actions will use the same method in the application, but obviously behave differently depending on the decision.

0-->Review_Application--> <> --> ??

The question is, after the decision node can I duplicate the last two actions twice for each decision flow and then join them to the final node. Or should I use a join node to after the decision node and not duplicate the last two actions? What is the recommended way to achieve this?

Many Thanks

Answer 1

My preference is to avoid fork/join unless there's real concurrency. So I would not use fork or join bars unless you had real parallel activities.

The left one makes more sense. Why?

In this case, the arguments inside the "Notify User" activity will be different.

They're two instances of the same type of activity. Someone may implement them as one method with different argument values.

You can clarify this by naming the activities with a name that clarifies what's different about them.

Your two "update audit trail" can both connect directly to the terminating node. Don't use a Join. Just connect to the next activity or state node.