Getting Started

Enterprise Architect offers a comprehensive suite of tools and features designed to enhance the productivity and accuracy of Software Engineers. These tools assist in creating software models, generating code automatically, reverse engineering source code and schemas, and synchronizing code with design models.

Configuration Settings

Selecting the Perspective

Enterprise Architect partitions the tool's extensive features into Perspectives, which ensures that you can focus on a specific task and work with the tools you need without the distraction of other features. To work with Software Model features you first need to select one of these Perspectives:

The Software Engineering Set:

<perspective name> > Software Engineering > Code Engineering

<perspective name> > Software Engineering > GoF Patterns

<perspective name> > Software Engineering > ICONIX

The UX Design Set:

<perspective name> > UX Design > Win 32 UI Models

Setting the Perspective ensures that the Case Management Model and Notation diagrams, their tool boxes and other features of the Perspective will be available by default.

Example Diagram

An example diagram provides a visual introduction to the topic and allows you to see some of the important elements and connectors that you use to specify or describe classes for the visualization of software and the forward and reverse engineering to and from a wide range of programming languages.

Integrated Development

In this topic you will learn how to use the fully featured integrated development environment. You will learn how to create structural and behavioral models of software artifacts in a rich code editor, generate and reverse engineer code, customize the way code is generated, run analyzer scripts to optimize code, use the debugger and set units test and much more.

Behavioral Models

In this topic you will learn how to generate code for software, system and hardware description languages directly from behavioral diagrams including: StateMachine, Sequence and Activity Diagrams. This will add new dimensions and precisions to the way you work with software and engineering systems.

Gang of Four (GoF) Patterns

This topic introduces the renowned twenty-three design patterns collected together as the Gang of Four (GoF) patterns which refers to their four authors. You will have at hand the solutions to common problems facing software engineers and be able to inject these patterns into your own models adding to the quality and rigor to your software systems.

Win32 User Interface Dialogs

In this topic you will learn how to work with Enterprise Architect's User Interface modeling capability that allows you to model user interface screens using Win32® controls. The models can be forward or reverse engineered and can also provide an interface for StateMachine and Activity diagram simulation, allowing them to receive and process user input.

Code Template Framework

In this topic you will learn how to work with the Code Template Framework which governs how models and converted to code. There are a standard set of templates but you can extended these to create your own templates and to generate code to suit your needs. There are also templates that control transformations and the generation of Database Definition Language (DDL.

Grammar Framework

In this topic you will learn how to create a grammar to convert an unsupported programming language into a UML model. Enterprise Architect has built in support for a wide range of programming languages but if you need to work with an unsupported language you can use the Grammar Framework to write your own parser. The grammar is used to reverse engineer programming code in the form of text and is the direct compliment of the Code Template Framework which you would you to specify how a UML model for an unsupported language is converted to code.

Code Miner Framework

In this topic you will learn how to work with a database of source code which provides access to the data hidden within source code in a timely and effective manner. Source code is parsed creating a tree structure which can be used to analyze program structure, calculate metrics, trace relationships and even perform refactoring.