Document Artifact: How to Reference Model Elements

[thomas.w]

AS UML Models alone are difficult to read,  I am using document artifacts as a way to explain key ideas of the design. It would be really cool, if I could create a hyperlink to a model element of my EA Model within the RTF document.

Does anyone know whether this is feasible? If so, how?

[Uffe]

Hey Thomas,


If it's enough to be able to follow the links from within EA (as opposed to exported or generated documents opened in MS Word or similar), it's actually pretty simple.

In the "Common" diagram toolbox you can create hyperlinks. In addition to web pages, these can target diagrams, elements, and packages, as well as a few other things including searches and EA commands. These all refer to the current repository, there is (to my knowledge) no way to target something stored in a different repository.

The EA RTF editor interprets these in the same way the diagram editor does. So while the RTF editor only allows you to specify link name and target as text, if you insert an EA-style URL it will be followed correctly.

Some formats:

• $diagram://{<diagram GUID>}
• $package://{<package GUID>}
• $element://{<element GUID>}
• $search://Name=<search name>;Term=<search term>;

You can find the others with some simple tests.

There doesn't seem to be a way to edit these hyperlinks once they're in place, but you can always delete and recreate as necessary.

Cheers,


/Uffe

[thomas.w]

Hi Uffe,

thanks for the quick reply, your answer addresses my use case.
inserting a hyperlink into the RTF using popup menu "insert hyperlink" and entering the URL as you have outlined helps insofar as clicking on the link selects the element in the project browser, which is half of what I wanted ...

Is there also a way that the diagram is also opened/selected, when clicking on the link?

Thomas