More filter options when generating RTF documents

[mjtapp]

This may depend on exactly how clever you are trying to be when generating documents out of EA, but one of the things I come up against time and time again is that I want to have a lot more control over how I filter the content of the documents I generate.

If you look at what the RTF generator lets you filter on (old or new) it is limited to date, package phase or element status. Given that you can also capture all sorts of other metadata about an element such as stereotype, priority, difficulty etc, etc, I think it would be incredibily useful to be able to filter on this information when generating documents.

I'll also go one step further here and suggest that what would also be very useful is the ability to filter content based on types of connectors and/or stereotypes associated with connectors. The reason for this is that I often have fairly complex models where elements are connected to other elements in different ways and I am often only interested in documenting certain types and combiniations of relationships at any point in time. At the moment the best you can do is generate documentation for all related elements regardless of the type of connector.

Currently, what I frequently have to do is post-edit my generated documentation to remove content simply because the filter options are not sophisticated enough, which I find very, very annoying.

How do others feel about this?

[pab]

I, for one, would love to be able to filter attributes and operations based on their scope---if I could generate a document that contained only the public interface, I wouldn't confuse my users so much.  I haven't figured out a way to make EA5.0#768 do that.  A generic filter capability would be very useful.

Peter