Link to artifact that is within another EAP

[softwareanalyst]

Hello all!

I have the following scenario:

I have one EAP file comprising company wide business processes, canonical classes, services etc.

and

I have multiple EAP files. One for each department comprising analysis model, use cases specifications, activity diagrams, design models etc.

We use Team Foundation Server as a version control system.

I would like to set links from within each department EAP (on artifact level) to the company wide EAP (on artifact level).

e.g. Within the department "finance" I have a "finance.EAP" with the specified class "bank account". I could like to set a link from "bank account" (finance.EAP) to the canonical class "account" (companywide.EAP).

How can I reach this goal?

Due to huge complexity and the need to work indepently combining the companywide.EAP and all department EAP is not an alternative. I already discussed this with some colleagues...  

Thanks a lot in advance!

[bernardm]

We also had the same requirement, but found not practical ways to implement it.
I still think that having one single centralized EA repository for all departements should be the way to go (for performance reasons, moving from EAP-based repository to DBMS-based repository is maybe inevitable). As far as we investigated, the major concern about this approach is security : how to insure that analysts from department A don't alter content produced by department B? The showstopper here is that EA doesn't provide package level security (yet ).
Regards,
Bernard

[qwerty]

That's definitely not true. Indeed the word "security" is the wrong term as you could annul it by going to the database like nothing. But as the modeling environment is considered to be peaceful and free of bad hackers the given security allows allows for locking packages, elements, diagrams on group level.

q.

[bernardm]

Of course the point is not to avoid hacking, but to make it less straightforward to change/delete artifacts one doesn't own or can't update because of package-level "security" configuration.
If you go directly to the database, even the current EA security model is useless since you can delete/update whatever you want.

[softwareanalyst]

Could we please go back to my question?  

[qwerty]

http://www.sparxsystems.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?num=1343911389/2#2

I've posted quite a bit about this matter. But it's too complex to simply be repeated. However, it might give a hint.

q.

[Robert Sheridan]

Have you looked at replication?  Not straight forward but an option.  The only other way I have considered solving a similar problem a few years ago was by import and export of XMI, but it is very labour intensive and would probably only work if you had accounts in each departmetn EAP which you used to lock out the departmental users from the master model.

[Geert Bellekens]

The key is version control:

- Make sure your company wide model is version controlled in TFS
- Import the version controlled part into your departmental models
- Create all the links you want to your company wide model.
- Whenever the company wide model has been updated your users will have to do a "getlatest" from their departmental model. If you have a lot of users you might want to organize this into releases.
- In TFS you can control access rights to your company wide model.

We have more or less the same situation and this is working fine for us.

The only other solution I see is to use one big central model.

Geert

PS. I should really write this down somewhere, I think I've repeated this at lease 10 times on this forum.