Visio Business Process Modelling Conversion

[brucebanner]

Hi

I have seen that there is a plug in for converting uml digrams in visio over to EA.  Is there a way I could use that to convert .vsd to XMI files?  Or alternatively is there something else that could be used?

[Geert Bellekens]

Yes, in theory that would be possible.
Whether that would yield any usable results is a whole other case.

Geert

[«Midnight»]

Perhaps you could import the Visio files into EA with the converter, then export the resulting EA model to XMI.

[Paolo F Cantoni]

I'm interested in doing something similar in the near future.

Would you be able to post some of your experiences (especially any "gotyas")?

It looks as though the importer hasn't changed since it was created quite some time back; so how it works with the latest version would be interesting.

TIA,
Paolo

[Martin Terreni]

Rigth now (at least with Visio 2007) it doesnt seem to be working properly

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Right now (at least with Visio 2007) it doesn't seem to be working properly

Martin,

Do you mean it won't import Visio 2007 VSDs - the importer says it requires Visio 2002 or 2003 diagrams - or that (like for me) it won't import Visio 2002 VSDs created by Visio 2007.  

Can anyone confirm that they have been able to import a Visio diagram into EA using the importer?  What was the provenance of the diagram?  (How was it created/manipulated prior to the EA import).

TIA,
Paolo

[Paolo F Cantoni]

I've now tried with what purports to be a native Visio 2003 diagram - still NO GO...

The importer doesn't recognize it as Visio 2003.

Reported,
Paolo

[«Midnight»]

Interesting. When the converter first came out in beta I evaluated it, or tried to, only to discover that it failed with Visio 2001 SP1. When the documentation appeared (with the production version) it turned out that it was designed to work with later versions. This meant at least Visio 2002. That version was concurrent and compatible with MS Office XP (or 2002), which enjoyed a limited following and short life being superseded. I suppose we need to make of it what we can.

[brucebanner]

Appreciate the help guys, looks like a lot of the add ons I attempt to use are for 6.5 as opposed to the current version.  Are the MDG add ons maintained by Sparx or the third parties?

[«Midnight»]

It varies. AFAIK this one is Sparx, but I could be mistaken. Regardless of who maintains it (or should) I don't remember any refresh of this product in recent times.

But check the Latest News section of the forum going back to EA 6.5 days. Updates to MDG products are usually announced by a there, in much the same way as new EA builds.

[edit]NOTE: Shortly after this was originally posted Sparx released version 1.5 of the Visio Importer. The new version seems to be a step forward in the context of this thread.

Please see the posts later in this thread for more details.[/edit]

[Paolo F Cantoni]

I've just tried the new version (1.5) of the importer and (for me it worked a treat)!

It's not obvious, but you can use the importer to import non-UML diagrams.  In my case, the diagram was created using (in part) the Visio Flowcharting template.

You just pick the EA diagram type that most resembles the source diagram.

The resulting EA (activity) diagram requires some rework for layout, but the result (from a fairly arbitrary flowchart) was quite impressive...

My congratulations to the Sparx Team!

Paolo

[Sunshine]

I've used the visio importer successfully in the past. I imported several process diagrams into Enterprise Architecture as activity diagrams. There was a little post processing of the diagram after importing but it worked.
One problem I did encounter was when I moved from an EAP file to SQL Server based model. For some reason it just wouldn't work when the EA respository was based on a SQL Server DB. My work around was;

1) Import the visio diagram into an EA model based on EAP file
2) Export the result into XMI file
3) Import the XMI file into the EA model based on SQL Server.

A bit convoluted but it worked.

I have to confess that I haven't tried the new Visio importer version 1.5 yet as I'm not doing any visio importing at the moment.

[Paolo F Cantoni]

...
One problem I did encounter was when I moved from an EAP file to SQL Server based model. For some reason it just wouldn't work when the EA repository was based on a SQL Server DB.
...

v1.5 RE'd into both an .EAP repository and a MS-SQL Server repository.

My belief is that there were some specification problems with the SQL Server versions of EA in the past.  We have standardized some of the column definitions so we aren't running on a "Bog Standard" SQL Server repository.  (In fact ALL the EA tables are actually views on an underlying table set - but that's another story)

Paolo