detail info about element

[xhanness]

Hi,

I was wondering if there is a way in EA API, how to get very detail information about a particular element in model. I would like avoid to hard-coding that form a ground ....

thanks

[«Midnight»]

Like all good things this depends on what you want. Can you be more specific?

[xhanness]

It would be nice to get as a string following properties:
name, steretotype, GUID, ID, all connectors, ClassifierID, Files, ... just everything ...

Let us say for debugging purposes ...  

[Geert Bellekens]

Not as far as I know.
I'm afraid you'll have to do the legwork yourself  

Geert

[«Midnight»]

But you can obtain that information without having to go beyond the API.

[xhanness]

what do you mean Midnight?

[«Midnight»]

I mean that although you have to write some API calls to get the information it should all be there. You won't have to write more 'exotic' code to (for example) open the background DBMS to extract and parse the data records.

You can write yourself a small helper library (if your programming platform allows this) with a few helper methods. These could grab the core properties common to all (or most) element types. Then you could access these as properties of one of your helper classes, or something like a combined string (perhaps an XML fragment or something). This would encapsulate your code so you'd only have to debug it once. It would also reduce the number of calls to the EA API by replacing these with a more 'friendly' call to your helper. You might even package the initial property retrieval into a constructor of the helper class.

HTH, David

NOTE: For most paradigms you will want to release the reference to the EA instance once your helper object has the data. Failing to do so can make for some messy side effects since EA uses the COM paradigm.