Importing mindmaps with relationships

[colin_e]

for business work in general I am a big user of mindmaps.

I have an existing mind map, created in another tool (MindGenius) and i'm trying to work out if I can import that into an EA Mindmap to make it a part of the EA model.

EA doesn't support any common mindmap file formats (e.g. FreeMind) as far as I can see, so CSV looks like my best option?

By exporting an EA Mindmap as CSV I can see the mindmap topics are considered classes in EA, but I can't see how the hierarchical relationship between topics is represented in CSV. Most dedicated mind mapping tools can use either tab-indents or legal-style item numbering (e.g. "1.2.10.6") to represent the hierarchy, but I can't see that option in the EA CSV import.

Is there an easy way to do this, or is the diagram that EA calls a mindmap so unlike the data structure in dedicated mind mapping tools that this is a non-starter?

[Uffe]

Hi Colin, and welcome to the forum.

How well EA's data model matches that of another tool I cannot say, but in EA's CSV format hierarchy is expressed using two columns CSV_KEY and CSV_PARENT_KEY. CSV_KEY unique to each element, and the CSV_KEY of an element's parent is specified in CSV_PARENT_KEY.

See here for further details.

Hierarchy is the only type of relationship EA's CSV format can express. Regular connectors cannot be exported or imported using CSV.

HTH,


/Uffe

[colin_e]

Thanks Uffe.

So, it seems it would require a custom pre-processing script to read the hierarchy in the source file, and convert it into a set of parent-child ID relationships. I need to consider whether that's worthwhile for my current one-off exercise.