# Class view

A class view is used to design the classes and may contain classes, states, class diagrams sequence diagrams and collaboration diagrams in any order :

A class view may have an associated deployment view, in this case the menu of the sub-classes propose a shortcut to create an artifact in the associated deployment view (refer to class menu).

## Menus

The menu appearing with a right mouse click on a class view in the browser is something like this, supposing it is not read-only nor deleted :

The menu entry select associated deployment view is only present when the class view has an associated deployment view, this feature allows to quickly associate an artifact to a class (see class menu).

### Menu : edit

The stereotype of a class view doesn't have a special meaning for BOUML.

As you can see, the association with a deployment view is made through this menu.

The editor button visible above and associated here to the description, allows to edit the description in an other window, or to call an external editor (for instance Xcoral) specified through the environment variable BOUML_EDITOR. Note that this external editor have to create an own window, its parameter is the pathname of the file containing the description, its execution is done in parallel with BOUML which looks each second at the file contents to get the new definition until the dialog is closed (I do not like very much this polling but this works even QT isn't compiled with the thread support).

### Menu : edit class settings

This setting allows to set a default visibility at the UML level for the attributes, relations and operations of the classes defined in the class view. default means that the visibility of the upper level is followed (which itself may be default etc ... up to the project level). When you create a new class view the visibilities are set to default.

### Menu : edit drawing settings

This dialog allows to specify how the class view's diagrams must be drawn by default.

### Menu : delete

The menu entry delete is only present when the class view is not read-only.

Delete the class view and all its children, and all the representation of them in the opened diagrams. After that it is possible to undelete them (from the browser) until you close the project : obviously the deleted items are not saved !

### Menu : mark

See mark

### Menu : generate

To generate the C++/Java/Idl code of all the sub-items. Refer to C++ generator, Java generator and Idl generator for more details.

### Menu : tools

The menu entry tool is present in case at least a plug-out may be applied on the class view.

### Menu : select associated deployment view

Only present when the class view has an associated deployment view, select it as you do this manually, except that you do not have to search it !

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