Managing requirements for wireframe elements?

[Marc Mathijssen]

Hi, I am currently working on a project where the development team is implementing pages based on existing wireframes outside of EA. The team has asked me to transfer the wireframes into EA for the sake of easily managing the requirements of the different controls and elements in the interface.

I have been struggling to find a way to setup my wireframes without having to define each textfield on the screen and individually add requirements for each element on each wireframe.

An ideal situation for me would be if I could create the element once, link all necessary requirements, and then reuse that element in my wireframes. I realize this is possible but currently there is the limit of 1 instance of an element on the same page. This makes creating a form out of multiple textfields a hassle, since I then have to resort to creating new textfields that lack the linked requirements. Creating instances of the object creates a non-wireframe looking object. This way I also lose the option to easily manage the requirements for each type of control.

Another option we thought of was documenting the requirements per type of control and then dragging the requirements onto the wireframe-element. This apparently only works 1 requirement at a time, so it does not seem to be the most efficient way. Besides that, it makes adding a requirement on all textfields throughout all available wireframes a very timeconsuming job since the application consists of hundreds of pages.

We're all out of ideas and I hope you might have an idea about how to tackle this problem. In the end we would like a setup where we can easily change (add, edit, delete) the requirements for a type of control used in multiple wireframes without having to update every wireframe in which it is documented.