Setting and removing actor inheritance

Actor inheritance allows you to establish relationships between actors.

Note: When you set actor inheritance, a relationship is established, but no properties are shared between the actors. Actor Inheritance creates a special relationship between actors. Property values of the parent actor are not automatically set as properties for the child.

Example

Sally, a business analyst, has created two actors: Part Time Employee and Full Time Employee. Some of her use case steps can be performed by both actors. Instead of including both actors in each use case step, Sally creates a third actor called Employee. She then modifies the two existing actors and sets the Inherits From property to the new Employee actor. Now, Sally can simply include the new Employee actor in the use case steps because the other actors inherit from the Employee actor.

To set the inheritance of an actor:

1. Open an actor artifact.

   Click the artifact ID link of the actor artifact you want to open.

2. Click the Edit link located under the Inherits From property.

   The Select Actor dialog appears.
   

3. Search or browse to select an actor.

4. Click OK.

   The OK button is only accessible if you have selected an actor artifact.

After you have set the Inherits From property, Blueprint displays the ID and name of the actor:

You can also view the actor inheritance on the Relationships tab in the utility panel if you select Other in the Traces drop-down:

To remove the inheritance of an actor:

1. Open an actor artifact.

   Click the artifact ID link of the actor artifact you want to open.

2. Click the Remove link located beside the Inherits From property.

Learn More

Actors

Adding an actor to a use case step

Use cases

Blueprint Documentation|Blueprint eLearning|About Blueprint ??2015 Blueprint Software Systems Inc. All rights reserved Last updated: 10/7/2015