Newbie Questions

[edusem]

I have a few questions regarding EA and hopefully somebody already has this figured out:

1) How can I specify the location of a particular element, as well as its size/width from a menu or properties option instead of having to manually drag it to a particular location? As an analogy, for example, if you are creating a box in Word, you can specify its location from the top or bottom of the page and can specify its width/height from a menu option.

2) How can I copy/paste single elements so that I don't have to recreate them every time I need a new element?

3) When I was working on the activity diagram in Exercise 2, I lost my label, i.e., the item in brackets: [correct], [trivial problems], etc. and could not find a way to get it back (I tried the hide/show label options but it didn't work). I was wondering if anybody knows how to do this (as well as copying a label and changing its name - again the copy/paste question).

I understand that EA is more than a drawing program and that the elements have links, properties, etc. that makes them more complex than just graphics on the page. However, there should be a way to take an existing element, copy it and change its properties, links, etc. manually very much like the ControlFlow activity relationship (the "arrows") where you can select the Source/Target, line style, etc. I tried the help on EA but could not find an answer. Any suggestions?
Thanks.

[thomaskilian]

1) Only using Automation (add-ins). There is no GUI to do that. I think it could be helpful and worth while a feature request.

2) You can use CTRL-click to re-create the last element

rest) no idea

[peter.zrnko]

2) see help on copy

[dbax]

3) You may have tried this but it doesn't hurt to ask: Did you try Set Label Visibility and play with options there?

[oscarsnr]

If you're feeling brave, you can go into the EA database and configure the appearance of objects on a diagram there. Try having a play with the 'Rect...' values in the t_diagramobjects table. (You'll have to reload the model in EA to see the results of your database changes).