Hyperlinks for Shapescripts

[Paolo F Cantoni]

In another post (Attach Shapescripts to Tagged Value Types/url]), I mentioned a competitive product in the Enterprise Architecture space that allowed one to visualise properties on the shape.  Another feature that it demonstrated was the ability to "click through" to multiple diagrams from the one object on a diagram.  Sparx EA has a restricted form of this ability via the (misnamed) composite diagram functionality - which places the little chain-link symbol at the bottom right of the diagram object.  Double-clicking the object will take the user to the attached diagram.  My diagrammer add-in uses this functionality to automatically maintain thousands of diagrams in enterprise-wide models.

However, there are issues with this and I'd (prior to observing the competitive product) has determined that a better way would be to create multiple "hot-spots" on the object to provide this multi-jump ability.  I'd also determined that a low-grade version could be created using hyperlinks (reduced to the size of the icon only).  However, there are issues with that also (positioning on the hyperlink relative to the main shape, for example - and making sure Z-order was correct etc etc.

It seems to me that a better solution would be to add the ability for a sub-shape to act as a hyperlink to a diagram.  In an analogous way to adding an image to a sub-shape (I think you can - and if you can't you should be able to ), one could add a hyperlink to the sub-shape and if the sub-shape were double-clicked, the user would follow the hyperlink to the target.  One would need to able able to piggy-back on the hasTag functionality to get access to a Tagged value containing the GUID of the diagram.  As with the "triggering sub-shapes via tagged values" proposal, I feel this is a winner as full-scale Enterprise modelling becomes more practical and acceptable.

Please support this proposal.

TIA,
Paolo

[size=0]©2012 Paolo Cantoni, Semantica[/size]

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Sparx have accepted this idea as a feature request, so please support it...

TIA,
Paolo

[Makulik]

+1 from my side