reuse of elements/diagrams in new projects

[sergeysps]

Hi there,
I was wondering whether any of you have some experience of constructing some sort of project templates and especially if there is any possibility of automatic update the projects which were derived from this template, in case the template  changes.
The situation is the following:
- There is a project A which consists of a large number of components and serves as framework for other projects
- Projects B-Z use some components from project A and have also some components on their own.

My actual approach would be the following:
- I store the framework in project A and everybody else gets only reading rights (I use version control from visual studio)
- When someone wants to create a project B which reuses Elements from A he first copies the A.eap to his drive
- In this project he create additionally to modelA, a modelB.
- From modelA he copies all the necessary elements to modelB.
- After everything is copied I can either delete modelA or export modelB (since only want show the used elements from project A).

I guess this would work but has two main disadvantages:
- If project A changes and I ve  already projects B-Z, then I might have to change them as well. (is there a possibility of creating some automatic scripts to solve that problem?)
- At the moment when I want to copy elements from modelA to modelB I really have to “ctrl-c->ctrl-p” which is not that nice. It would be cooler if could do it graphically in a diagram. I was trying (when drag&drop the elements from A to a diagram in B) to create a simple link (didn’t work after export, which is obvious), create an instance or a child element. When I created an instance then after export of modelB, the elments, which were copied from modelA, didn’t have a name anymore, which seems very strange.
It would be actually  nice if before export I would be get at least warned about the dependencies or something.

I’m not planning to use version control of EA since it is not planned that different people work on the same project simultaneously. I would like to have different projects, using by different people but sharing elements from a main project. Some sort of automatic update in case of major changes of the main project would be of course great.

//Sergey

[Niy]

I dont know the cvs capability of Visual Studio, but the builtin-package-control can work with .xml import/export -- I would suggest you use that and work in different models of the same project. The path to the .xml should be a networkpath with all reading- and you writing-rights
That way you can use linked components and the like.

[Paul Lotz]

My advice is to use version control (even though you said you don't plan to do so).  Then you can include the packages you want in the relevant projects.  (Since you are reusing the packages you actually do have multiple people working on a project.)  Version control is great for other reasons, even if only one person is working on a project.

[Geert Bellekens]

I agree with Paul,

I don't know any other way then using version control for this purpose.

Geert

[qwerty]

Instead of version control you can set the package simply as Controlled which gives the opportunity to save a shared XMI which then can be imported the same way in other models.

q.