How to get the fully qualified named?

[Ericga]

When working on class diagrams the fully qualified name is not shown by default on the diagram. What's even stranger is that displaying the Properties dialog for a class does not show it either!?  :-?

If I have: cust.abc.apt.Stream and cust.abc.arc.Stream, the diagram AND the Properties dialogs will show just "Stream" for both. How do we tell classes apart?  

At best I can make the diagram display "cust::Stream" which still doesn't help. We need to see the fully qualified name but I haven't found how yet. Such a basic thing...anybody has a clue how to enable this?

Thanks

[smendonc]

The two common areas I check when I run into this type of issue are:

• From the menu Tools-->Options-->Diagrams.  Make sure the 'Disable fully scoped Object Names' option is not checked.
• In the diagram properties; right click on diagram and properties, the 'Show Additional Parent' and 'Show Namespace' should be checked.

There are other options in the diagram properties that may also impact what you are seeing.

[Ericga]

Thank you for replying but these options were already set correctly and all classes are still showned as cust::Stream so we don't have the full name available anywhere.

I also researched all other options I could find before posting but nothing seems to apply. I have the latest build.

[Eve]

EA doesn't show the fully qualified name.  (Use the Feature Request link at the bottom of the page)  But you're getting cust::Stream? If that's the case, one of the following is true.

• Your packages are all reversed in the project browser  (cust is under abc etc.) and Stream is contained directly within it.
• The above is true, but the reason is that you have reversed the fully qualified names in your post and they are actually apt.abc.cust.Stream and arc.abc.cust.Stream.
• Something is seriously messed up, which I am not seeing on my computer.

[Ericga]

You are right, It is apt:Stream and arc::Stream but the problem is the same.

> EA doesn't show the fully qualified name.  

Even in the detailed Properties dialog? In short there is no way to uniquely identify a class in a diagram. Isn't that a serious conceptual bug more than a feature request? (sorry, the product is fantastic but I am really annoyed by this problem because it makes EA diagrams useless for us)

> (Use the Feature Request link at the bottom of the page

I've done that in the past without any result. I have also raised that issue in the past and got the answer to use the Alias to override the name; which is absurd with thousands of classes. So I was told to use scripts but they are not available in the professional version, so I was told to use automation at which point I dropped the issue and used our previous software to produce diagrams. This is my second try at EA. We bought just 5 licenses until we could prove management  it worked for us and have never been able to produce something useful because names are always truncated.

[Geert Bellekens]

Ok, I can understand that having the qualified name available can be interesting sometimes, but aren't you taking this a bit far saying that the diagrams are useless?

- You have the name of the parent package available on the diagram
- If you select a a class and press Alt-G it will select the class int he project browser so you can see exactly where it came from.
- In the project browser you can get the fully qualified name by selecting "copy reference/copy node path to clipboard"

Do you really want to the see the qualified path of every object in the diagram? I don't think they would still be readable, or at least they would not be as clear as they could be.

Maybe you should rethink whether it is absolutely necessarry to display the fully qualified name on the diagrams.

Geert

PS. The lack of the scripting feature shouldn't stop you from writing tools to customise EA to your likeing. It really isn't more effort to create an external add-on/in then to create a script, and it is certainly more maintainable in the long run.

[Ericga]

> If you select a a class and press Alt-G it will select the class int he project browser

A diagram is meant to be printed.

> Do you really want to the see the qualified path of every object in the diagram?

We are dealing with object databases with roughly 12,000 classes and about 2,000 persistent classes. We have table inheritance, row type inheritance , embedded objects, mixins and all the variations that multiple inheritance can bring and all kinds of relationships you can thing of.

Diagrams are useful to understand the parts you are working on but even more to be able to query the db for reports. We have dozens of diagrams because usually you want to see just classes you are interested in but these can  be for very different packages.

EA diagrams are useless in their current state when dealing with large object databases. We can use it for design or other types of work but class diagrams are usable from a practical standpoint. I agree a product can't do everything but I also think being able to see the full name of an entity is a basic need and there should be a straightforward way to do it.

> PS. The lack of the scripting feature shouldn't stop
> you from writing tools to customize EA to your liking.

I agree and that was my intention but I lacked time. The way things work I have to allocate a resource to write EA plug-ins (and I will have to do that eventually for more complex needs) but management will be reluctant to allow resource allocation to make something work out of the box when the justification to buy these licenses in the first place was to save development time.

I did ask that feature last year and just iced the project for some months expecting the problem to disappear eventually (displaying a name is not that big a feature) since I add explained at length why this is crucial with OO databases but it obviously didn't lead anywhere.