Comments

Enterprise Architect provides a great facility for maintaining a daily log of ideas, comments, notes, suggestions, events, to-do lists and other reminders of what the developers concerned with a selected element have done or intend to do for the selected element. Like the model-level personal Journal, this is a good way to keep the momentum flowing day to day. The facility is simple to use, allowing you to quickly jot down your thoughts as they occur to you.

The 'Comment' tab is part of the Collaborate window, and allows you to record points as you work on, review and discuss the element with other team members.

Access

Creating the first 'Comment' tab entry

If you are the first to access the 'Comment' tab for an element, it has the single entry 'Today' in the 'Date' column. You can type freely in the 'Comment' column against 'Today', including carriage returns and text formatting. Right-click on selected text to access the editing options (derived from the Notes context menu), which include:

• Creating a Glossary definition from the text, inserting existing definitions in the text, and highlighting terms that have been defined in the Glossary
• Generating a new element in the same Package, with the selected text as the name and linked to the text
• Creating a link from the selected text to an existing element in the model
• Creating a hyperlink to a wide range of target objects, including image files, diagram images, web pages, text files, Help topics and Enterprise Architect commands
• Marking selected text for special translation, or to be omitted from automatic translation
• Applying a range of character formatting options, such as font type and size, bolding, underlines and italics, and removing those character format settings or applying the default font
• Applying bullet lists or numbered list to the paragraphs of text
• Searching for instances of the selected text in a range of sources (options derived from the 'Code Editor' context menu)
• Undoing the latest change to the text
• Editing the text, with cut, copy, paste and delete, and selecting all the Comment text entered for a day
• Printing the selected text, and checking meanings and synonyms using the online Thesaurus

When you have finished typing your comments, click off the Collaborate window.

You can return to the Comment at any time (as long as another user is not actively updating the tab) and:

• Add further notes; you and other team members use the same Comment to record notes and comments on the element throughout the day
• Edit the existing text, including reformatting
• Delete text or complete notes; select the text and click on the Delete key or use the 'Delete' context menu option

Comment Entries Each Day

Every day, when you open Enterprise Architect and review the 'Comment' tab for an element, it has a 'Today' item at the top, against which you record the day's Comment entries on the selected element. Beneath the 'Today' item are the entries for previous days, identified by the date on which they were made. These only include dates on which an entry was made; there are no blank lines for days on which no entries were made.

As you build up a number of comments on an element, you can set the number of comments to display (effectively the number of days on which comments were posted) in chronological order, starting with Today. To do this:

1. Click on the Hamburger icon at the top of the tab and select the 'Show this many comments' option.
2. On the submenu, click on the number of days for which to show comments - 1 (Today), 3, 7, 15, 30 or All (every comment posted on this element).

You can also pin the currently listed comments for an element to the tab. Those comments show in the tab regardless of which other element you are working on, which is a useful way of showing instructions written to guide your work on other elements. To pin the comments:

1. Click on the Hamburger icon at the top of the tab and select the 'Pin this comment' option.
2. When you want to display comments for other elements, click on the Hamburger icon again and select the 'Unpin Comment' option.

As well as formatting and editing today's entry, you can edit the entries for previous days. This means you can remove information that is no longer relevant (such as old reminders) or things that were listed to be achieved that are now complete. On the other hand, you can also highlight entries that are still significant, and refer back to them from the 'Today' entry.

Learn more

• Introducing the Journal
• Code Editor Context Menu
• Notes