Delaying the receipt of asynchronous messages

In Unified Modeling Language (UML) sequence diagrams, you can move the sending point and the receiving point of an asynchronous message between lifelines to manipulate the time delay between the sending event and the receiving event. Multiple messages can occur between the sending and receiving lifelines.

You must have a sequence diagram that contains lifelines with asynchronous messages open in the diagram editor.
To delay the receipt of an asynchronous message:
  1. In the Palette, click Asynchronous Message.
  2. Click the source lifeline where you want to start the message and drag the message first horizontally and then vertically across existing messages to the target lifeline where you want to terminate the message.
  3. Complete one of the following steps:
    • If the target lifeline represents an instance of a structured classifier type, such as a class, name the operation and click OK.
    • If the target lifeline represents an instance of a non-structured classifier type, such as an actor, rename the selected message and click OK.
The source lifeline is not blocked and interactions can occur between the points of the send and receive events.
Related concepts
Messages
Related tasks
Creating synchronous or asynchronous messages
Adding create or destroy messages to lifelines
Deleting messages
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