Element Lifecycle

A model element comes into existence when it is created by using the Element Wizard View. From then on, the element typically exists “forever”, unless it got successfully deleted from a SNAPSHOT module.

Every element belongs to a module. One says: The module owns the element. As long as the module’s status is SNAPSHOT, the element can be moved to different modules. For all other statuses, the element is bound to its module. A bound element cannot be modified in any way, even its name cannot be changed.

When the version of a module is incremented, a copy of the module is created. This includes the creation of a copy of each element in the module. A new element has a pointer to its predecessor. And the previous element has a pointer to the new element. This way, the complete history of each element is known to the system. The Element History View displays that history for a given element.