Please note : This help page is not for the latest version of Enterprise Architect. The latest help can be found here.
Virtual Documents
Both standard and custom report templates generate documents that present information reflecting the organization of the Project Browser. You can also generate document and web reports independent of that organization, grouping and ordering individual Packages and elements according to whatever criteria you want to apply. For this purpose, you use virtual documents.
You can create separate virtual documents describing, say, the Requirements, Use Cases or Design elements of a project, based on individual Model Document elements. Alternatively, you can make these separate sections of one report, retaining their own different formats but with common headers and footers, organized under a Master Document Package element. Any Table of Contents, Stylesheet and/or Cover Page you select would be applied to the combined document and could apply your corporate standards across all the Model Document sections. You can create as many virtual documents as you want, for as many combinations of information as you need.
Elements, Templates and Content Definitions
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Document Elements |
Master Document and Model Document elements are available from the Documentation page of the Diagram Toolbox; on the Toolbox, select More tools | Documentation.
When you drag the Master Document and Model Document elements onto a diagram, the following symbols display, respectively:
The Documentation Toolbox page also provides the:
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Generate Report to an Artifact Element
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Templates |
For each Model Document element, you can create a custom template; for example, a specifically-designed Requirements template for a Requirements document, or a Use Case template for a section on Use Cases. For web reports, you identify the template on the Publish as HTML dialog; for document reports, you specify the template name as the value of the RTFTemplate Tagged Value. The Master Document element has its own RTFTemplate Tagged Value, which defines the headers, footers and any other common content; you can import your corporate standards template and insert its name in the Tagged Value. The template in the Master Document overrides the templates in the Model Documents; for example, header and footer definitions in the Master Document template override any header and footer definitions in the Model Document templates. In this way, you can apply consistent and continuous styles and page numbering throughout the report generated through the Master Document. If you want the Model Documents to have their own styles, applied through their own RTFTemplate Tagged Values, either leave the Master Document RTFTemplate Tagged Value blank (for completely separate overall styles) or remove the definition of specific styles from the Master Document template.
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Design Custom Document Templates
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Content |
The content of the report is defined as either:
You can control the sequence in which information is presented in the document by, for example, changing the sequence of Packages in the Model Document or the sequence of Model Documents in the Master Document.
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Add Packages to Model Document Delete Package in Model Document
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Notes
| · | In a Model Document for a document report, you should not define both a list of Packages and a search; if both are present, when you generate the document it is created from the Package list only |
| · | You cannot use Bookmarking in Master Document elements, which effectively replace Bookmarking in Word Bookmarking requires each bookmark to be unique; when you generate a report with a standard template (including in a single Model Document element), each bookmark is unique and there is a 1:1 association between the Elements-details being generated and the elements in the repository As Master Documents are intended to contain multiple sub-documents, the association ceases to be 1:1; there is no simple method that enables the generated data to be uniquely identified directly in association with the original element |
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Learning Center topics
| · | Alt+F1 | Enterprise Architect | Reporting | Rich Text Reports | Generate a Virtual Document |
