Need stable file names in generated RTF doc

[cspowers]

Howdy,

The more I use EA the more I like it! But there's currently one annoyance in version 3.10 that I'm wondering if it's possible to fix. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong.
It has to do with generating pictures of the diagrams.

Here's what I currently do. I use the EA feature to generate RTF documentation for my entire project. This runs through and generates an RTF document with links to a bunch of images in the images directory. I call this doc EA.RTF.

But _my_ design is in a separate document, let's call it design.rtf.  So what I do is open both the EA.RTf and design.RTF. I go through the EA.rtf document select the diagrams, and do a copy-n-paste from the ea.rtf into design.rtf.  I copy-n-paste the diagrams as _links_ so that design.rtf is now dependent on the images files in the images directory.  

So far so good. If I update a diagram. I can regenerate the RTF doc, which regenerates ea.rtf and all the images. Because design.doc is linked to image files, it picks up the updates too. Run design.doc through acrobat and I have design.pdf and everything is groovy. :-)

But here's the problem. The image files are numbered, apparently sequentially based on the order they are generated. If you create a new diagram in your model, it affects the order that the diagrams are generated and thus the file names of the diagrams in the images directory. design.doc apparently does it's links strictly by file name and these links are not updated during the doc generation rocess. Therefore the links in design.doc now point to the wrong diagrams and I have to go through ea.rtf and recopy the links into design.doc again to get design.doc to point to the right diagrams.

What I need is for the name of the image file to be _fixed_ so that the diagram always produces the same image file name everytime I regenerate the documentation.

I can think of a couple of ways to fix this:
1) derive the image file name from the name of the diagram in the browser. The problem with this is that sometimes you like to change the name of a diagram and you;d have a similar roblem as described above.
2) Let the user specify the file name of the diagram in the properties dialog of the diagram. This is appealing , but means some extra work on the end user part and what happens if they don't specify a file name.
3) When a diagram is created, assign it some number that is unique to all diagrams in the model and ensure that this number never changes. It lasts as long as the diagram lasts. Use this number to generate the file name of the image that's generated.

I like option 3 the best, but I could live with 1 or 2 as well.

If someone knows a way to work around this problem using the existing builds, please let me know! Thanks.  

[gsparks]

Hi,

The simplest solution would be to have EA write out diagrams using filenames derived from the diagram GUID. The XMI exporter already does it this way already ... so it would be a minor change and not impact any existing models/documents.

Ill see if I can get it done over the next week, ready for the next update build.

Geoff Sparks

[cspowers]

You da man! Thanks! And yes this will turn into a purchase of the full product. It's just a matter of waiting to see if I can get my boss to pay for it or not. :-)

[cspowers]

Hey,

Just wanted to say thanks for putting stable file names in build 479! So far it seems to be working ok.