element notes in project browser

[AlexY]

Hello All,

is there a way in EA to enable notes to be shown in project browser next to name of element as on the drawing below?

Code: [Select]

Package1          Notes for package Package1
    Diagram1          Notes for diagram Diagram1
    Class1          Notes for class Class1
         AttributeA          Notes for attribute Attribute1
         OperationA()          Notes for operation OperationA()
    Class2          Notes for class Class2

I think I have seen appropriate option somewhere in EA that as per my understanding should have allowed to enable this mode, but can't find it now.
In any way, experts, please help, otherwise I believe it is worth to request this as a new feature.

Thanks,
Alex.

[Geert Bellekens]

I haven't seen such an option.
You can show notes in the element on a diagram, but I don't think you can show them in the project browser. (and I don't even want to)

Geert

[AlexY]

Hi Geert,

thanks for reply.

I should say that I would not want to have it in each and every project too.. but there are projects & use cases of EA where having the notes shown in the mode I described would be extremely helpful.

One from cases I am dealing with is representing of objects of IBM System i platform in UML models.
Name of an object on iSeries is restricted with 10 characters. Additionally, there is no notion of a hierarchical folder structure on the platform - only flat libraries structure, with libraries not possible to host other libraries. As such, the libraries (namespaces) usually contain a lot (thousands for mid size system) of objects (programs, data files and etc.).
To accommodate for the restrictions, naming standards for the objects are usually very cryptic.  Therefore, the description attribute is used very extensively on System i to provide clues about purpose of an object. Native iSeries tools, allowing to browse objects (similar to project browser in EA), as a rule, display the description alongside of the object name to help to identify & differentiate the objects.
The notes attribute in UML is the perfect place for descriptions of the System i objects, but if the notes are not displayed in EA project browser, it makes it quite complicated to work with such EA model comparing to the use of native System i tools.

Alex

[Christoph W]

Hello Alex,

why not swap the roles of name and description (or other descriptive fields)? The name could be human-readable information. The 10 character name could either be encoded in the name (e.g. surrounded by #, or the very first word), or be encoded in the description field.

Just a suggestion.

Christoph

[Christoph W]

Oh and one more idea, even though I don't know whether it actually can be implemented: From all I know EA supports automation by 3rd party software. It shouldn't be hard to write a little helper tool that connects to EA, pulls out the name/description info and renders it in a treeview. I image that automation is bi-directional, so selecting an element in the external tool window would programmatically select the element in EA, too.

[Geert Bellekens]

Come to think of it. You could use the Alias field for the 10 character code. I think that is what it is there for.

Geert

[RoyC]

You could also use the Element List with Display Notes turned on - either to show the first line of Notes text or the full Note. With the filtering options in the Element List, this might help you quickly see what is what in your packages.

[AlexY]

Thank you to everyone for suggestions. My comments & questions are below. Please answer or suggest otherwise if I am wrong in my evaluation.

(1) By Christoph: "why not swap the roles of name and description"
My understanding the suggestion is to put both System object name and description into one property of element as a structure with markup to differentiate b/w members of the structure - System i object name & description. I guess it also implies name the property is the name of UML element, otherwise it will not be shown in the EA project browser.

Concerns: the System i descriptions can be up to 80 characters long. Combined with name of object it will be at least 91. If it appears in project browser it OK, but use of such name in a diagram will make such a diagram next to unreadable.

(2) By Christoph: custom development based on automation interface.
 I am not sure if the interface is “bidirectional” in the sense described – unlikely so.
Custom development is generally possible, but unfortunately guaranteed brings more issues than it solves – cost of development, support, maintenance and etc.

(3) By Geert: Use of alias.
Just tried – it is possibly a direction towards a solution.
Question: is there a way to enable to show both the Name and the Alias in the EA project browser? If not, then it does not really address the goal.

(4) By RoyC: Use of element list with display notes.
It is a nice feature to review & edit the notes (descriptions), but one from my major use cases is pull the elements, identified based on iSeries name + description, from project browser into diagram. The “element list” view unfortunately does not support this use case,

[Geert Bellekens]

3. No I don't think so.
I only found a option to show name and Alias in diagrams.

Geert

[Geert Bellekens]

(2) By Christoph: custom development based on automation interface.
 I am not sure if the interface is “bidirectional” in the sense described – unlikely so.
Custom development is generally possible, but unfortunately guaranteed brings more issues than it solves – cost of development, support, maintenance and etc.

The bidirectionality is not a problem, but unfortunately EA does not allow an addin window to be docked. Only the Main Diagram window can be used to show custom views.
You could of course create an addin to show the custom treeview, but that will have to exist outside of EA.
The cost and maintenance of custom development is indeed a factor, but at least EA is very good at being backwards compatible. Upgrading is usually a breeze (especially compared to other UML tools I've worked with).

Geert

Geert