make it easier to use instead of increase complex.

[tom37590mosi]

I'm quite happy with using EA. EA provides almost every feature you can imagine and which you need in your daily work. But some of them are quite heavy to use and understand. I'm a business analyst and not a technical engineer. So therefore the EA isn't the most preferable tool for business engineering. On point is the report generation. What I imagine is a 'living document'. That means, after generating a report I would like to make also changes within the report. The objects within the report should actually be the same as within the model and always be synchronized. The report generation itself is as well not usable for business purposes. If I want to generate a propper document, it's almost impossible to format it with an appropriate effort. Why don't you provide a feature like drag and drop directly objects into a report. I want to drad'n'drop every element, diagram or folder directly to the perfect formatted report.
Hope you very much that you can provide a solution soon.

[stevesavage]

@tom,
You can drag and drop directly in to a report.

In EA you can drag elements from your project browser in to an RTF document linked to the element.   The element text will be linked from the document to the element using the element's GUID.

Unfortunately as is this is a one way link, e.g. click on the link in the document and EA highlights the element in the project browser.

I use this mainly for importing existing documents in to EA and then highlighting text in the document to create requirements elements, etc.

To make this more powerful, I started looking EA's API.
I've created 2 scripts:

• 1 to update the elements in the repository to have the same name as the linked text in the document,  
• the other to update the linked text in the document to be the same as the element name

The difficulty is if someone has updated the document and someone else has updated some of the elements.  

So I've decided that once the document is created, all updates must happen on the element.

[stevesavage]

To expand on Tom's request.

I'd love to be able to generate a report that contained "data fields" instead of just text.  The data fields would contain the visible text, but also the GUID of the element, and the name of the property the text was from.  (If this is already possible using the Report template please let me know.)

An option in EA would then allow you to import one of these living reports and re-sync the fields.

This would allow us to change the layout however we need to, but still keep the information in the document in sync with the repository.  

[stevesavage]

Took a closer look at the current use of "MAILMERGE" fields for reports.  Currently the field is named by the element.property, and the value is the text to display.

If we could only add in an attribute for the GUID, we'd be able to have live documents.

[stevesavage]

A bit cludgy, but this might be what we are both looking for:

Creating Word Master Documents
The new RTF reports now support the creation of bookmarks for Packages, Elements and Diagrams. These bookmarks are GUID based numbers.

Bookmarks are markers that are automatically placed into your rich-text document when it is generated. You can create a master document in Word, and link to sections of an Enterprise Architect report based on bookmarks. For example, a Word document may have a section for a small part of your component model – using bookmarks you can generate a full component model, and then link into just one section of the report.

This way you can maintain a complex Word document from parts of EA reports. If you link into EA reports, then you can regenerate the report and refresh Word links to update the master document, without having manually changed anything.

http://www.sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/9.3/reporting/o526.html