Importing model from Tau

[Uffe]

Hi!

Does anyone have any experience with importing a Tau model into EA? Pitfalls, dos&don'ts, that sort of thing?
I'm looking at a one-off scenario so it's no biggie if there's a fair bit of manual labour involved.

/Uffe

[Paul Lotz]

We did try exporting a model from Telelogic Tau to EA about a year ago.  Tau exports to one version of XML (unless you are willing to spend a lot of money for an add-on).  We were able to open the Tau model in EA but the diagrams didn't transfer (or at least not meaningfully).  What we found was that XML versions of models work well within tools but not between tools, despite the hope for interoperability.

In the end, we hadn't done that much with Tau anyway, so we just started fresh with EA, which I have found to be 100 times the better tool both in terms of functionality and usability (and at a much better price).

[Uffe]

Thanks for that, Paul. Anyone else?

My situation is similar, we're changing over from Tau to EA on, among others, my own humble recommendation. We're in system design right now so the model isn't too huge and consists primarily of use cases and UC realizations - no code-related entites.

XMI in itself unfortunately has some holes which makes it hard to achieve true interoperability. I wasn't expecting the diagrams to make it across, but what about the entities?

Are you saying that in the end it wasn't worth the hassle and turned out better simply to rewrite the model from scratch in EA? 'Cos if that's the case, it's not outside the bounds of feasibility.

[«Midnight»]

I have had to deal with incompatible model transfers more than I care to remember. On a few occasions there was nothing to be done other than write a customized XMI parser to process the output from the 'foreign' tool, then an automation client to populate the EA model.

Overall the effort has ranged from modest to significant, and the results from fair to excellent.

This has become easier over time. Partially because I am getting used to the process, but mostly because the needed features in EA have improved.

That said...

There is a tool out there someplace that does XMI transformations between a large number of UML applications. I simply don't remember the name or vendor. You should be able to find one of these (there are probably others beyond the one I'm thinking of) with a few Web searches. If not, search this forum - go all the way back, since I don't remember the product being named in the past year - and you might find a reference. I don't know what keywords will work, but the product has been cited a few times.

[smendonc]

Here's one that does quite a few translations, include tau to ea according to the web site  http://www.metaintegration.net/ .