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Digital Watch

This digital watch was first designed by Harel, the founder of the Statecharts Theory. He described it in "On Visual Formalisms", published in "Communications of the ACM" in May 1988.

The Digital Watch in all its Details​

As you can see in the picture below, the complete statechart is rather complicated and not easy to grasp on first glance:

The digital watch statechart in all its details

Gaining a Better Understanding Using Subdiagrams​

We can use a CREATE SCT feature to extract composite states into subdiagrams. This makes the statechart much easier to comprehend:

The digital watch statechart with details hidden into subdiagrams

Using subdiagrams allows you to abstract the statechart to any level you want, so that you can review the statechart's overall functionality and its inner workings separately – much like a class diagram versus the complete codebase. Copy the example to your workspace and try out the subdiagram editor!

The Interface Definition​

For reference, here's the interface declaration of both statecharts:

Interface declaration

Get this example​

The complete project — statechart models, sources and build files — lives in the itemis CREATE examples repository. Inside itemis CREATE for Eclipse you can import it directly with the example wizard.