My first extension to EA

[peppermint-bunny]

I am working on a very large project in which we have imported into our EA project via a csv file several hundred elements.  I now have to establish connectors between the elements.  I was hoping to write a c# app to facilitate this.
I can link between c# and my ea project.  And I understand how to create a new connector and set the object id for the start and end.
I have two questions:
1) should I develop an addin or a standalone exe?
2) how does my app identify the 2 elements to be connected?  I was thinking of the user clicking on the start and end element in the project browser.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

[Oliver F.]

If you want an integrated and interactive solution then there is no way around an add-in or script.

If you want it fully automatic then the (not so complicated) stand alone solution will also work.

Is there another way of exporting the source elements than by csv?
Maybe you can give each element a unique id and associate the connected element as a separate field in the csv which would it make possible to store it in a tagged value. Your application could then automatically set the connection according to that definition.

Or you could store the connection information in a separate file (csv, xml, whatever) which is then parsed by your application.

I did this when importing our business model from an Oracle DB and associating various attributes, links, datatypes, etc. from csv files.

Oliver

[peppermint-bunny]

Oliver,

Thanks for you reply.  You have given me a lots of options to mull over!  I think Ill try developing both an addin and a standalone and see the pro's and con's of each for my current problem.  This will help me learn about about. (I'm thinking of recording my efforts on a blog)

I really do like your idea of a file containing the connection information which my extension could parse and then act on.  Great idea.  i can see this as quite realistic to implement on a large project with several modellers.

Charlotte