Messages

1

Suggestions and Requests / Re: 8.0 diagram enhancements

« on: October 12, 2010, 08:38:54 am »

You are not late as they still haven't done anything to fix the basic diagram issues. Some of the problems were reported 2 years ago and we are still waiting. I've switched to MagicDraw in the meantime because it can at least display the class name correctly

2

Suggestions and Requests / Re: 8.0 diagram enhancements

« on: September 18, 2010, 05:33:45 am »

again and again and again and again...be able to display the full name of a class. Just a check box will do but if you want to be fancy look at MagicDraw

3

Suggestions and Requests / Re: 8.0 diagram enhancements

« on: June 24, 2010, 11:14:50 pm »

By priority:

1. be able to display the fully qualified name instead of just a truncated name. We have been waiting for this bug fix forever...

2. In the Relationship pane, allow multiselection so we can select multiple classes and do "Place in target" on the diagram all at once. This will speed up work 10x

3. Support different layout algorithms. Orthogonal and hierarchical layouts are common, efficient and widely used in other good products.

4

General Board / Re: How to show full package (namespace) name

« on: June 15, 2010, 11:51:10 pm »

Geert,

I know creating add-ins is easy but we are not just using EA internally but also promoting it to our own corporate customers. If we need to supply an add-in for them to use it it must go through the whole product delivery workflow (specs, dev, QA, delivery, training, documentation, support, etc.) which cost 10x the price of the software. It is much simpler to tell them to buy something else which we don't have to support directly because it works out of the box. If they want 10 or 100 licenses they just buy it and we don't get bothered.

5

General Board / Re: How to show full package (namespace) name

« on: June 15, 2010, 11:03:22 pm »

We are now recommending Rational Rose (expensive) and Poseidon http://www.gentleware.com/(cheap) and ArgoUML http://argouml.tigris.org/ (free) depending on the customer need. We are also looking at others like http://www.visual-paradigm.com/

I still do prefer working with EA except it is unusable for our customers in its current state and I can't spare a developer to create and maintain a EA add-in to fix basic EA gaps.

6

General Board / Re: How to show full package (namespace) name

« on: June 15, 2010, 10:41:10 pm »

I know about the alias field but we have over 12 thousands classes and feeding that field automatically is not straightforward in the professional version. Also notice the fully qualified name is not even available in the Properties dialog of an entity. The only way to know which entity you are dealing with is to locate it in the project browser.

This is rather stupid. We are not asking for a special feature but only to be able to see the NAME of the class. How can you work with something without seeing its NAME? You don't need a phd to realize this is an extremely basic "feature". Not being able to see which class we are looking at is absurd. It is not a stellar request requiring 100+ hours of development either. The same problem can be seen in many panes (ex: Relationships) because names are truncated by default.

I'm using EA internally when designing new stuff but we are now recommending both commercial and open source alternatives to our corporate customers because EA doesn't fill their need for diagrams and Sparx doesn't care.

7

General Board / Re: How to show full package (namespace) name

« on: June 15, 2010, 05:11:17 am »

If you ever find a way, please post it. I tried asking for the feature (18 months ago and still waiting) and I also reported it as a bug in the latest beta. No result. Sparks doesn't even recognize why this is an issue(!). So we are now recommending alternative products to our 2000+ corporate customers.

8

General Board / Re: How to reimport the same package?

« on: April 19, 2010, 10:02:16 am »

Thanks. I might resort to that but I have never had any luck with sparx support. I've asked for 2 years to display entity names in diagrams without truncating them and I have never even been able to make them admit it's ludicrous the fully qualified name is not available in the properties dialog of an entity, so I won't start discussing something as complex as XMI with sparx's support when it's not possible to make them admit something obvious.

The current limitations with XMI are frustrating but I can certainly understand why they exists and why sparx has not removed them. It's probably a lot of work and there probably are feature requests with higher priorities.

An EA project seems to be an access database (at least I can open it with it). I can't say I like Access but if I can find time to figure out the schema it should be possible to update all tuples defining a diagram to use the same objects from another model and then delete the original one. I of course define "same objects" in this case as objects with the same fully qualified names.

eric

9

General Board / Re: How to reimport the same package?

« on: April 17, 2010, 06:42:23 am »

Back to square 1: is there no solution to re-import a package?

10

General Board / Re: How to reimport the same package?

« on: April 17, 2010, 12:46:26 am »

I tried to follow Nizam's suggestion. I have found the Manage Baselines... menu. I am not familiar yet with that functionality but the menu doesn't do anything. I also found Compare from XMI in Package Control but got this error:

Error: Unable to compare to file. Requires XMI 1.1 from Enterprise Architect.

So I assume EA compare tool is only compatible with EA XMI and not with XMI standard files in general.

Eric

11

General Board / Re: How to reimport the same package?

« on: April 16, 2010, 11:58:45 pm »

Nizam,

You said:

> You might as well do a compare with XMI (if you have XMI 1.1), and merge from baseline to the model.

How can I compare and merge? This seems a possible solution.

12

General Board / Re: How to reimport the same package?

« on: April 16, 2010, 11:56:14 pm »

 One can't expect code to be static so how can I resynch then?

13

General Board / Re: How to reimport the same package?

« on: April 16, 2010, 11:26:11 pm »

Geert,

If it is an EA specific extension, how can I re-import XMI that was generated by another system? (an OO database in this case)


Eric

14

General Board / Re: How to reimport the same package?

« on: April 16, 2010, 10:12:05 pm »

Thank you for answering. Maybe the root of the issue is the absence of UUID in the XMI. Is there a way to deal with that?

If there is not, and I want to attempt modifying the XMI to include globally unique identifiers, do I need to use real GUIDs? The XMI standards seems to accept any kind of string with the propperper prefix: The values of this attribute should be globally unique strings prefixed by the type of identifier. There is also an example in the standard that uses a simple string:

<UML:Operation xmi:id="idO1" xmi:label="op1" xmi:uuid="DCE:1234">

So if I have to make up my own UUIDs, my questions are:

1) is there a recommendation about the prefix that should be used? DCE seems to be reserved and I am not sure if I cam improvise one?

2) If any string can be used (i.e. not necessarily GUID-like) is there any limitation in length?

Thanks again for any tip

Eric

15

General Board / How to reimport the same package?

« on: April 16, 2010, 12:53:32 am »

Hello,

I simply need to refresh all classes I previously imported though an XMI file. I have an updated XMI to import but I am getting duplicates instead of just the update I am looking for. I can delete the old ones but I will lose all diagrams.

What is the simplest way to do this?

thanks

Eric