Reverse Engineering - Package Diagrams

[eppinkf]

I would like to check if there is a way to generate Package Diagrams when doing Reverse Engineering, i.e. when importing source code.

The background of this question is, that for some big (C#) Projects I get several Class/Logical diagrams (options: 'Create Package per Namespace' and 'Create Logical Diagram for Each Package') when doing reverse engineering but no package diagram which would help to get an overview. For one C# project I have around 100 Packages each with its logical diagram, which is hard to handle.

Searching the forum I have found, that it is possible to have Sequence Diagrams be automatically/reverse engineered (http://www.sparxsystems.com.au/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=general;action=display;num=1163527508;start=1#1) but I found no information on package diagrams. Therefore I assume that there is no way to generate package diagrams.
Please confirm or give information on how to do it.
Thanks

[«Midnight»]

I remember seeing something vaguely like this come up quite a while ago. If my memory is correct, Sparx confirmed that EA will not create package diagrams in the circumstance you describe.

I think this was an oblique statement in the middle of the answer to a different topic, so it could be difficult to find. I might also be wrong on this, of course. Hopefully one of the Sparxians can confirm.

It is entirely possible that once you do get the package diagram, or diagrams if you create these at several levels, worked out, that EA will leave them in place through later reverse-forward engineering cycles. This would at least preserve the work you'd need to do.

It might also be worth creating a small automation project to assemble these diagrams for you. This would likely take less time than assembling 100 packages by hand one time.

[My first though was to drag one of the packages onto a diagram and then insert related elements, constraining to Packages - and perhaps Package links. The results when I tried it were not promising, but perhaps someone knows a tweak to make this work.]

David

[Eve]

David is correct on all counts (although this has been mentioned in several threads including some directly)

EA doesn't create dependency relationships between packages when reverse engineering, but if they (and/or diagrams) are created it will not touch them at all.

Additionally, as David said, it would not be hard to write an addin to detect the relationships between classes and create dependencies between their containing packages.

[mfritz]

if I have understand you correctly, you want to generate a package-dependency diagram, where you can see which package depends on which other.

there exists an EA-plugin called "RizoSuite" developed by SparxSystems CEE. As far as I know at the moment only a beta-version exists.

Because the do not offer this beta-version for download, you can have to write an email to one of the contact-persons there (e.g. [email protected]) and try to get a copy of it.