Hi Michael,

I just came along another question regarding state machines and sub machines.

With "typedef my_initial_event initial_event" it is possible to customize the initial event. This does not work for nested sub machines, because in those cases msm just forwards the event that triggered the state change so that we end up in the sub machines initial state. Msm does not use the specified initial event of the sub machine to trigger the initial state of the sub machine.

Correct. This is actually the wanted behavior to respect the Liskov substitutability principle. It would be confusing if you replaced a substate by a submachine and get a different entry behavior. This means that the containing machine's initial event will get propagated to any substate or submachine marked as the initial.

Actually, this is exactly the behaviour what we want

I'm not sure I get. You'd want the submachine to use its own initial event and receive this one instead of the containing machine's? It's probably possible but I'm wondering what could be a use case for this. Could you please elaborate?

but is it UML conform? Do you have any idea?

Neither is actually ;-) UML does not define the notion of an initial event. It was added into msm to allow a unique interface for entry behaviors (instead of one for "normal" entries and one for entry through an initial pseudo-state. All what UML defines is an initial pseudo-state which can have only one outgoing transition to a real state (making it the initial state). This cannot even be a real transition, it can have no event and no guard, only an action. So, as UML has no initial event and it is purely a msm construct, we are free to define it as we wish. I suppose we could allow the submachine to override the default behavior, but I would need to see at least one compelling use case before I punish compilers with some more metaprogramming ;-) Regards, Christophe