In this post I talked about how Decorations - an early feature of LiveModel that fell out of favour with the introduction of meta-modelling - had found a new lease of life as a way to compress model information into a diagram.  Well, the feature just got extended furher.  The first iteration was limited to walking a single relation to find the object  whose name should fill the decoration.  For example, given this model structure:

Task --> Application

we can display the application name as a decoration on the task.

But what if the structure looks like:

Task -> Workstep -> Transaction

and you want to display the transaction's mnemonic as a decoration on the task?

Well, now you can.

The <RELATION_DECORATION ... /> specification can now include a relationship path.  For example:

You can see the second of the two <RELATION_DECORATION> XML nodes has attribute Type="22/23".  This says, first follow relationship type 22 and then relationship type 23 to find the target object whose name should become the decoration.

Transactions are treated as a special case.  Transactions have a display name - Create Sales Order - and a mnemonic - VA01.  To conserve space we use the mnemonic for the decoration.

Here's a complete example showing decorations for Task/Application and Task/Transaction:

All together this makes the cross-functional flow diagram an incredibly powerful modelling tool for capturing and later communicating people (role), process (task) and system (application/transaction) information.