Typing Data - IJOY94/flow-design-cheatsheet GitHub Wiki

To describe the data flowing in a Flow Design just put some name between the brackets next to the arrow, like x in this example:

The default convention is: If the name of the data item starts with a lower case letter, it describes the content of the data, e.g. sum, coordinates, filename. The name then is about the meaning of the data within the context of the data flow.

In this case the type of the data is assumed to be a primitive type (e.g. integer, string, boolean) and obvious (or of little importance) to a reader of the data flow.

You'll probably follow this convention in most cases. But sometimes you want to or need to be more precise:

	Explanation
	count will be translated to an "obvious" primitive data type like int or long.
	count will be translated to data type specified.
The explicit data type is written after the data item name for convenience sake. While designing at a flip chart or whiteboard you mostly think of the meaning of data first, then of its exact type.

	Explanation
	A capital letter at the beginning of the data item name denotes a custom data type.

A custom data type can at the same time work as the data description like in the above case; but you can also give it an explicit name, e.g. (deliveryAddress:Address).

The first time you're using a custom data type be sure to add a data type description to your Flow Design. This can be done with a small table like shown.

The same conventions of course apply to state data of function units, e.g.