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Thomas Mercer-Hursh

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Repository
« on: September 27, 2007, 09:46:06 am »
When I look in the help and SDK for Repository Schema, all that is there is "Enter Topic Text Here".  Is it all just guess and try or is there some documentation somewhere?

«Midnight»

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Re: Repository
« Reply #1 on: September 27, 2007, 10:22:27 am »
No, something got broken.

Send in a bug report and Roy et al will probably get this fixed up by build 818.

I don't know if Sparx has yet actually published (let alone documented) the schema. If you want something to work with, you can either read one of the SQL scripts, or attach to a DBMS project via Project | Database Engineering | Import DB Schema from ODBC. This works well, but remember to have a target diagram ready.

David
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Thomas Mercer-Hursh

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Re: Repository
« Reply #2 on: September 27, 2007, 11:01:12 am »
Well, other than some hitches that I am still working through with support, I have built the repository, so I am able to print out the DB reports on the schema ... but there is a lot of guessing between field name and function, if you know what I mean.

«Midnight»

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Re: Repository
« Reply #3 on: September 27, 2007, 12:51:30 pm »
Do I ever!

The SDK beta was an attempt to work on this area, perhaps as far as demystifying some of this stuff. While this has yet to happen, I get the impression that Sparx expects to make real progress here. The SDK started with parts of the original documentation, and some new stuff was added from there. They also did some real cleanup on the prior verbiage.

Sometime in the most recent build or two the SDK returned as part of the main documentation, but the work goes on. Roy and his crew are making definite progress in this area, but remember that they have all the rest of the docs to work on as well, so progress is gradual.

My hope is that Sparx will eventually document how the schema is supposed to fit together. [I consider how it actually does so to be an instance, since the actual implementation will evolve as does EA.] As well, I'm hoping that some formality will be introduced on how the various text and memo fields that contain custom-formatted information work, so that we're not guessing all the time. Some of these fields clearly change over time, but that doesn't mean they cannot be documented, just that there is additional work that Sparx must do to keep EA usable by the community.

Sometime in the future we'll all have to deal with another schema. It's clear that Sparx wants to defer this 'pain' as much as possible, but the above "work" is part of the cost of doing so.

[OK, rant over for now. This is YA 0.02 CAD. Still, given the recent change in currencies, that might actually be worth something...]

David
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RoyC

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Re: Repository
« Reply #4 on: September 27, 2007, 02:26:38 pm »
Oops!  That wasn't supposed to happen. It seems that our Help tool will hide work in progress unless you specifically search for a term that happens to be in the hidden topic. And since one of the good features of the compiled output is a rapid and effective search tool, it is likely users will expose "invisible" topics quite easily.

I have removed the work in progress to a separate project file.

Thanks for telling us about the glitch.

Roy
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Thomas Mercer-Hursh

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Re: Repository
« Reply #5 on: September 27, 2007, 02:45:52 pm »
Only, in this case I would love to expose the hidden material for whatever partial gems of wisdom it contained ... if I only knew what to search for. :)

«Midnight»

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Re: Repository
« Reply #6 on: September 27, 2007, 03:38:37 pm »
And let's be serious folks. If this is the worst problem we have, we're happy people.   :)

Keep up the good work Roy. We'll continue to let you know when we find the holes, and you'll continue to plug them. It gets better all the time...

David
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