Real support for miltplie VS projects per Model

[gtschech]

As seen in multiple discussion threads, it is currently not possible to use Sparx MDG for Visual Studio 2005 in a multi-project-Environment.
Typically, a large VS solution consists of a common root namespace (e.g. Company.Project) and every Project holds one sub-namespace (and its descendants), e.g. Company.Project.Common in the "common.csproj", Company.Project.Web in the "web.csproj" etc.
Now I'd really like to have the following:

• the class diagram in Sparx is organized in my namespace hierarchy (that's possible today)
  
• the "Class Model" package has the 'root namespace' set to the value "Company.Project" (that's not possible today)
  
• the individual projects are linked to the different packages below "Class Model" (that's possible today)
  
• the reverse engineering honors the namespace hierarchy from the "Class Model" node onwards and only creates sub-packages for the descending namespaces (that's not possible today)
  

So if the "common.csproj" project is linked to the "Class Model -> Common" package, the class "Company.Project.Common.Helper" inside this package would be reverse engineered directly to the "Common" package; the class "Company.Project.Common.Tools.AnotherTool" would imply a sub-package named "Tools" under the "Common" package.

Without this behavior neither forward nor reverse engineering is possible in a significantly big project...

Guenter from Frankfurt/Germany

[«Midnight»]

Surely the Company Project is not distributed to all developers as raw source code.

If developers see this as a (compiled) shared library of sorts, try importing with the Import Binary Module function of EA. Now you have both the object model and the namespace available for you to extend from.

You might have to do something along the lines of exporting to an XMI file, then importing at the beginning of each project. However, if you are working at this level of sophistication you probably also support a shared repository - or at least individual repositories in a corporate database. You could do the XMI import as part of an automated project setup function.

Would this work, at least partially?

David

[gtschech]

Hi Midnight,

unfortunately, it doesn't.
The projects I am thinking of (working as a consultant, I have seen some of those) are divided in layers. That means the class model shows the whole story (View, Controller, Business, Data Access) vertically in one picture, while the project is organized horizontally (one project per layer). So to display the vertical class diagram and generate the horizontal code, your suggestion does not help; sorry...