Perspectives

Enterprise Architect provides a wide range of built-in modeling languages and technologies, and sometimes it can be difficult to identify the right tool or combination of tools to meet your exact modeling requirement or scenario. The Perspectives facility helps you to quickly and effectively filter the overall modeling capability to a Perspective Set of technologies that are relevant to a domain, such as Requirements modeling, and further refine the tools for more specific tasks within that domain, such as Business Rule modeling, in a Perspective.

Perspectives:

• Are selections of Technologies - some specific to one of the many modeling languages - and their model and diagram Patterns
• Are tailored to domain-specific modeling scenarios; when you work in a specific domain, you can apply a Perspective to expose appropriate facilities and hide all others
• Remove the significant distraction of having to identify and assess multiple technologies before proceeding with your work
• Help you to select and apply an environment of particular modeling languages or Technologies, enabling you to work effectively and efficiently on the task at hand
• Help you to switch easily and quickly between tools when your modeling focus changes; you simply select another Perspective from the list of Perspective Sets (which identify the domain they support) and Enterprise Architect then hides the features of the previous Technologies and applies the new environment

Initially you can select from the thirteen built-in Perspective Sets and the more than 60 Perspectives they provide. As your experience in modeling with Enterprise Architect develops and your work becomes more specific, you can create your own custom Perspectives. This helps you work within a Technology that you might have recently imported and activated, or apply a combination of Technologies that are not associated in the built-in sets.

Overview

You select and switch to the required Perspective through the 'Perspective' option at the top right of the screen, or through the 'Start > View > Perspective' ribbon option, or through the Perspective Portal in the Portals window.

Selecting a built-in Perspective automatically brings up the Model Wizard, which provides a rich set of new model patterns and guidance notes, filtered to narrow down the available patterns, technologies, diagram types and other modeling constructs to the precise set required, with similar actions on the Toolbox and dialogs. This helps you to quickly build accurate, focused models with minimal 'noise' and maximum fidelity.

Applying a Perspective mainly takes effect through the Model Wizard, 'New Diagram' dialog, Diagram Toolbox and 'Stereotypes' dialog, for creating model structures. The Model Wizard and the 'New Diagram' dialog also allow for swapping Perspectives instantly, making it easy to find and change to the exact modeling tools required.

As a huge boost to models encompassing several disciplines and modeling domains, selecting a Perspective provides its Technology as an available development tool, whilst all existing model structures that make use of the hidden Technologies still render and work as normal.  If you have a model that contains, say, a BPMN View and a SysML View, you might apply a Perspective to support the creation of BPMN structures and see only BPMN templates and Toolbox items in your BPMN development. But if you open a SysML diagram during this work, you will still see the SysML Toolbox pages, Properties pages and options that enable you to properly examine that diagram.

To further enhance your modeling experience, you can also use the Perspective Sets window to filter the Perspectives, hiding complete Perspective sets or individual Perspectives. This enables you to reduce the list of Perspectives offered for selection to just those you are likely to use.

For specific instructions on using Perspectives, see the Using Perspectives Help topic.

System Perspectives

Enterprise Architect provides a rich set of more than 60 Perspectives built directly into the application. These have been crafted to align with the multitude of roles that modelers perform; these are grouped into Sets that make finding the right Perspective quick and easy, and include:

• Business sets for Strategy, BPMN, Business Analysis and more, helping the business user focus on their current task
• SysML, MBSE, Software, Simulation and others, for the Systems Engineer and Software Engineer
• Archimate, TOGAF, Zachman Framework and GRA-UML, version-specific sets that provide the most common tools for the needs of Enterprise Architects
• SPEM, Process Guidance and MDG Technology Builder for Project Managers

Each set contains a number of relevant and useful Perspectives. This diagram shows an example of three Perspective Sets, each of which contains a number of Perspectives.

For a more comprehensive description of the built-in Perspectives, see the Types of Perspective Help topic.

Custom Perspectives

In addition to the built-in Perspectives, you can create any number of your own Perspectives on the 'My Perspectives' tab. While the built-in, or system, Perspectives typically contain a single language or technology - for example the BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) Perspective allows you to focus on just BPMN  - custom Perspectives allow you to open a number of technologies at the same time. For example, if you regularly create prototypes you might want to create a 'Prototyping' Perspective that groups the technologies and modeling languages you use in that work.

Custom Perspectives do not automatically open the Model Wizard; as they combine facilities, the system cannot determine which sets of Patterns to automatically present.

These custom Perspectives can be created, modified and deleted as the roles you perform change over time. For information on creating custom Perspectives, see the Customizing Perspectives Help topic.

Learn more

• Using Perspectives
• Customizing Perspectives
• Types of Perspective
• Model Wizard
• Add New Diagrams