11. Scope

Decision

Update grammar to seamlessly deal with the 2 flavors:

• Explicit

  s1 = softwareSystem "s1" "description" "tags" 
  
  p1 = person "p1" "description" "tags" {
      -> s1 "description" "technology" "tags"
  }
  

• Implicit

  s1 = softwareSystem "s1" "description" "tags" 
  
  p1 = person "p1" "description" "tags" 
  
  p1-> s1 "description" "technology" "tags"
  

Context

Due to its inherent nature coupled with IDE built-in facilities - such as region, collapse, outline - navigating through a .dsl file is pretty easy. This said, relationships can become difficult to deal with as we have more flexibility to position them within the file.

To deal with that, Structurizr language knows about scoped relationship where left part of the relationship defaults to the element in scope.

Consequences

Encourage people to use scoped relationship to promote encapsulation. There is no reason to materialize a relationship involving 2 components of a container outside of the scope of this container, but noising the higher level picture.