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Model Perspectives
Enterprise Architect is used by a wide range of teams, from executives and Business Architects who model organizational change and strategic direction at the highest level, through to Technology Architects who model infrastructure and implementation at the lowest level, with a large number of other disciplines in between. These additional disciplines include Business Analysts, Process Analysts and Requirement Analysts; Information Architects, Data Architects, Application Architects and Security Architects; System Engineers and Product Engineers; Testers; Scrum Masters and many more.
Enterprise Architect has a huge range of available features supporting these disciplines that, when seen together, might be difficult to assess. To ensure a modeler can quickly identify and use the features of greatest value to the role they are performing at a particular time, Perspectives have been created to bundle the features - including modeling languages and example patterns - into sets. This allows you to effectively change roles and focus simply by switching to another Perspective - almost like putting on a different hat. When a Perspective is selected the tool instantly changes to hide the irrelevant features and only display the ones defined for that Perspective. Some modelers might select or be assigned a single Perspective for the lifetime of a role or project, whilst others might switch Perspectives five or six times a day.
The Perspectives are completely configurable, allowing fine grain inclusion (and thus exclusion) of language constructs and tool features; this can be done at a whole-model level, security group level or personal level.
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 built-in Perspective Sets and the more than eighty Perspectives they provide. As your experience in modeling with Enterprise Architect develops and your work becomes more specific, you can create custom Perspectives either just for yourself or for all users of the model. 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 name> option at the top right of the screen (which identifies the currently-active Perspective), or - Through the 'Start > All Windows > Perspective' drop-downs in the ribbon, or
- Directly through the Perspective Portal in the Portals window
Selecting a built-in Perspective automatically brings up the Start Page 'Create from Pattern' tab (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 Diagram Toolbox pages and dialogs. This helps you to quickly build accurate, focused models with minimal 'noise' and maximum fidelity.
Applying a Perspective mainly takes place through the Model Wizard, 'New Diagram' dialog, Diagram Toolbox and 'Stereotypes' dialog, for creating model structures. Note that the <perspective name> option sets the global Perspective for the model and in these dialogs and displays, but the windows, dialogs and ribbons allow you to swap to a different Perspective for a work task instantly, making it easy to find and change to the exact modeling tools required at that moment.
As a huge boost to modeling 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.
Additionally, the model administrator can tailor the Perspectives and/or ribbons available to each User Security Group, as a Perspective Setting or Ribbon Set for each group. This filters the Perspectives available to a user according to their security group, rather than their personal choice. See the Perspectives for Security Groups Help topic.
Regardless of which Perspective you select, all of the coding languages, templates, RTF templates and images remain immediately available.
For specific instructions on using Perspectives, see the Using Perspectives Help topic.
System Perspectives
Enterprise Architect provides a rich set of more than eighty Perspectives built directly into the application, which have been crafted to align with the multitude of roles that modelers perform; these Perspectives 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 image shows an example of the Analysis Perspective Set, 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 'Model-Based Sets' or 'Personal Sets' tabs. While the built-in, or system, Perspectives typically contain a single language or technology - for example the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 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.
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.