Glossary and TFS

[softwareanalyst]

Good morning,

in our company we are going to use Enterprise Architect 9.3 Professional in a multiuser environement (TFS repository) with about 20 users (mainly software analysts, some software developers).

The TFS handling for Use Cases, Requirements and other artefacts coming from the software analysis is pretty smooth. No problems here!  

The handling of the glossary on the other hand could be easier. The requirement is that all EA users should enter glossary entries in a "user friendly way"...  

At the moment we use the "project -> Model Import/Export -> Import Reference Data -> ..." functionality for the glossary which becomes a annoying and error-prone.

Is there a more user friendly way to share a common glossary? If so, could you please give me a hint? How do you handle the glossary in a multiuser environment with TFS?

Thank you in advance and cheers from Germany
Andreas

[qwerty]

You might think of modeling a glossary as a package with <<term>> elements (as extension of class or artifact) linked or embedded with <<trans>> elements holding the description in various languages.

This is a completely different approach but has a lot of advantages.

q.

[softwareanalyst]

Hi q,

thank you for the quick reply.

The "Modeling a glossary as a package with <<term>> elements approach" is quite a workaround I could (should?) consider.  

Thus unfortunately EA does not recognize and link the terms while writing the specification. Or have I just not found this feature in your solution?

Andreas

[qwerty]

This is actually the drawback. However, you can get around that via a simple macro shadowing the elements into EA's glossary on a nightly or per user call.

q.

[softwareanalyst]

I don't have any experience with macros in EA yet.
Can I shadow the elements into the glossary.xml or into the "real" "internal" EA glossary?

[qwerty]

Well, we use direct SQL to create the glossary from the elements (t_glossary is the table). This can be achieved by either the API (parsing the elements in the glossary package) or from an external program doing the SQL by parsing the XMI export of the glossary package.

Either way it's a good idea to get familiar with EAs API if you're planing to do some serious work.

q.

[softwareanalyst]

I will have a look into the API.
Thanks for your assistance!