Alternate to EA RTF generator

[SomersetGraham]

Hello all
Does anyone have any experience of the EaDocX addin?

[Geert Bellekens]

Geert - I know we showed you a very early prototype of eaDocX a year ago - things have moved on a lot!
We have a new Beta at http://www.eadocx.com- please have a look. We built-in many of the features you asked for last year, including making it a full EA Add-in.

Thanks
Ian Mitchell - eaDocX Development

Hi Ian,

I'll take a look and see if eaDocX can convince me now  

Geert

[fwoolz]

Since an EA model resides in an RDBMS, it is always possible to generate finely tuned documentation in an ad-hoc manner using either the RDBMS reporting tools or by writing code that explicitly generates the documentation desired in the required format. I have done that a number of times for specific client needs.

What we (the EA user community) need is a doc builder that provides what amounts to (or comes close to) ad-hoc documentation design. This means, I think, a scriptable doumentation generator, which EA's RTF generator does not provide. For example, I would love to be able to produce the guts of an IEEE 1016-compliant SDD from EA without a mess of manual work currently required (been there; done that).

Hope springs eternal...

[skiwi]

It seems to have many limitations.

What are the limitations that concern you?

[skiwi]

what I find a real nightmare is 'formatting or styling consistency' within this rtf thingy ...especially when you distribute your elements accross different paragraphs, to get consistent list of paragraph headings is a terrible job to do and with so many iterations ....

I reiterate, this is an issue with the use of RTF as the underlying format, and the many issues Word has with numbering, and with multiple versions of a style in the same document (something EA could and should fix by only inserting a style into the generated document once).

We have successfully surmounted this by ensuring that ALL model document templates have exactly the same word styles, based on normal.rtf.

[Ian E Mitchell]

At the risk of wanderings into the minefield that is the 'document generator', I've been a user of EA for many years, and, in desperation, have written what I think is the "ad-hoc document generator" being sought. It's been 6 years in the growing, 18 months in development, and has 1 year of productive use on a 4-BA project. My current main document is 307 pages.

The product is eaDocX, and you can download a beta at http://www.eaDocX.com.

It's not the finished item, but if you need to create ready-to-publish Word documents from EA, it's worth a look. Getting EA and Word to play nicely is a bit like getting elephants to dance, but we've tried to keep the steps simple....

It's been enough to convice my current customer (A large UK mobile telco) that eaDocX makes EA suitable for anyone/everyone in the organisatrion to use, now that we can create better documents than hand-crafted Word+Visio ones. Good news for UK-based EA experts.

Anyway, please have a look, and let us know what you think.

Ian Mitchell

[Stefan Bolleininger]

Hi Ian,

it is very nice to hear about a new realese, but unfortunately i'm not able to download it from your page (registred user)

error 403.

it looks very nice but i'm still not sure if it will bring up my functionality i miss i´directly in EA.

but i will see on this release

can you give me some hint how to avoid the error 403 ?

[Ian E Mitchell]

What's you eadocx.com user name ?

[Stefan Bolleininger]

Hi Ian,
you have a new pm