Converting basic UML classes to Archimate elements

[John Hart]

Within my project I have ArchiMate_Representation elements that do not sort together within the Project Browser - I performed an XMI export and noticed that elements are grouping based upon uml:Class and uml:Activity but both have identical icons in the Project Browser. My guess is that the uml:Class is Archimate 2 and  uml:Activity is Archimate 1 - (I'm not clear how we ended up mixing both Archimate versions within the project - but we want to standardize upon Archimate 2). I would like a means to quickly/reliably convert the uml:Class elements to uml:Activity, so that we do not need to rebuild all of the relationships within the numerous diagrams that exist within the project - I contemplated hand modification of the XMI, but I’m balking due a lack of understanding of the attributes and schema of the two elements (additionally, this would be subject to a high degree of human error).

My hope is that Enterprise Architect would provide a mechanism to convert the elements for me… or that there would be a Window script/tool that I could run to do the conversions…

[qwerty]

I have no idea about Archimate in particular, but from a personal experience I know that profile conversions are tedious. The problem is that things have a (slight) different semantic in either version. And in most cases it's only a human that can make the distinction. When converting you need to move the tags attached to profile1 to that of profile2, add those new to #2 and remove old ones from #1.

You might support that with some scripting. However, it will be quite some work.

q.

[RoyC]

Have you seen this in the Help?

http://www.sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/10/domain_based_models/migrate_archimate_1_0_to_archi.html

(Sorry, Neil!)

[John Hart]

I did see the Migrate ArchiMate 1.0 to ArchiMate 2.0 post and it did not serve my purpose.

The issue was precipitated by creating Archimate elements using the Archimate toolset directly and creating other elements as normal classes and then setting the stereotype to an Archimate element type --- these are not equivalent - even though for most intents and purposes these appear to equivalent within the system...

Nonetheless there doesn't appear to be a good way to convert the class based elements into true Archimate elements either manually or automatically (in bulk)...

I've changed the title of the post to reflect the true nature of the issue in case anyone follows along needing the same information...

Thanks for chiming in.

[qwerty]

Well, exactly what I said in my post above  :-/

q.

[Ian Mitchell]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think you could export the elements to an eaDocX Excel spreadsheet, change the Type column to be 'Activity' not 'Class' (or v/v), then re-import. All the connectors will be preserved.
I'm not an Archimate expert, so I can't be sure, but at least if it doesn't work, it'll do so very quickly...

[ken.norcross]

I have done conversions using scripts that would create the new element in the same package as the old element, copy attribute and tag values from the old element, and then also "steal" the relationships from the old element and repoint them to the new element.

This leaves the old element without any relationships, which is easy to verify in the traceability window. Then you can "find in all diagrams" and manually replace the item in all diagrams. The realtionships have already been moved and should appear as you drop the new element on the diagram.

Part automation and part manual work. The diagram part could probably be scripted also but I did not do this.