Complex Documentation in EA

[Vinnie]

I am in charge of generating documentation of the models of the company I work for. Been trying to produce a RTF template using EA's template generator for a while already. Unfortunately, without success.

Basically I need to do 2 things:
1) Given a scope (a package), print all the classes of type 'x' that appears in at least one diagram in the given scope package (and all its children, their children as well and so on), as long as all the classes of type 'y' that are also in a diagram of the scope package and which have a relation of type 'r' with the classes 'x';
2) For the classes of type 'z' in the same scope as above, print all its hierarchy in a custom formatting. Supposing that Person is supertype of Man and Woman, Man is supertype of Husband and Woman supertype of Bride, the document must look like:
               Person
                    Man
                         Husband
                    Woman
                         Bride

Now I would like to know if any of you have ever done anything like that and what would you recommend me to do. I tried to use SQL queries joint with template fragments, but could not obtain the expected result.
My last hope is to use scripts, instead of SQL, to see if it can be done. However, I didnt find any documentation talking about using scripts with RTF document generation.
Another solution would be to use a library to generate a MS-Word document and create an addin to solve the problem, thus forgetting the EA's document generation at all.

Sorry about the long post, but what would you guys recommend? Any hint is welcome.

Thanks!

[Stefan Bolleininger]

Hi Vinnie,

can you explain a bit more about the classes y?

Did you have taken a look at model documents?

I recommend you to write an add-in for EA and let it do your operations one after the other. Afterwards you can combine these documents within word and save it. :-) I did that as well to do similiar things.  

Best regards

Stefan

[Ian Mitchell]

Have a look at eaDocX: we designed it to help you spend less time creating documents, and more creating good models. No programming required!

[Vinnie]

Hey guys, thanks for the replies.

Stefan,

The 'y' classes are regular stereotyped classes just like the 'x' classes. In a diagram I have many "x -r-> y", for example, and I want all these y for a particular x within a diagram.
Aren't model documents the same as the fragments in a RTF template?
Finally, by writing an addin and combining the operations within word do you mean using a document generator other that EA's? I though I couldn't use programming with EA's document generator, but sorry if I misunderstood.

Ian,

I have taken a look at eaDocX webpage already, but haven't downloaded the tool yet. Are you saying it is possible to do the things I want with it?

Thanks again!

[Ian Mitchell]

@Vinnie: I haven't studied your example in detail, but it would certainly be worth a look at eaDocX. There'a a 30-day free trial, so it won't cost you anything...

[Robert Sheridan]

I am not sure exactly what you are wanting to do.  Are you trying to report on elements that only exist in diagrams in the package scope?  If this is the case then you need to configure the diagrams and the report accordingly.

You can also set up report layouts so that only one end of a connector is output in the report, or you could just output connectors and ignore the element section of the reports.

You can also add filter conditions so that you only output particular types of connectors and elements; however, if you do this you need to consider whether or not you want to output children of filtered out elements (there is an option to control this in the generator).

This approach assumes a diagram centric output.  If you want to find all instances of a particular element and process them together then I suspect the only way to do that would be via some form of query, script or addin or a tool such as eaDocx or getting a list of all the elements and then running for each element the same report filtered for that element and manually collating the output in a document.