Link from external source (JIRA in my case) to internal objects/elements in EA

[SadBunny]

Hi all,

I spent time searching for any ideas on this, but all I can find are tons and tons of pages about internal links and links from EA objects to external/outside sources.

We recently defined some CI/CD goals and we would like to be able to somehow link from our JIRA board stories/tasks (or word documents or outlook or any outside source really) directly into EA. Think documentation review requests with links straight to the object-to-review. Now, our solution architects etc. write/edit documents in EA, then have to either maintain a central page in EA with links to the edited page that need attention, or provide UID's or paths that others (devs, testers) then have to search in EA. This is not very efficient.

Now, I don't know how EA actually works, it's my first few days working with it, and I realize that linking into an application is not something that would be in there by default, but with a big application like this there's bound to be things hidden under the hood that I don't know of yet. So, is there any way that this could be done? One thing I could imagine is e.g. a webservice on localhost that makes the EA jump to a certain point if you call it with a certain parameter? (Quite specific, but hey, what do I know? )

I'm a total EA noob so excuse me if I miss the obvious. But I'm facing an enormous documentation base in EA that I would like to use in a more efficient way and I'm looking for the low hanging fruit to start with   Thanks in advance, hope I was clear enough.

[qwerty]

I guess that Geert will chip in, but here's a link you might be interested in: http://www.sparxsystems.de/partnerprodukte/ea-connector-for-jira/

q.

[SadBunny]

Thanks for that link!

However, we are not looking for a full integration or synchronization between JIRA and EA, as the intersection between what we're doing in JIRA and in EA is actually quite shallow and it would be overkill and introduce more overhead headaches than it's worth 

All that we're actually looking for is a way to link from *any* external source into EA.

[qwerty]

You would need something to open the repository (means: an identifier for that) and the reference inside. This reference would be the GUID of any element, package, diagram, operation or attribute. In most cases companies work with just one central repository, so you would need only the GUID.

q.

[Geert Bellekens]

There is an old an abandoned open source project called EA Protocol Handler that does exactly this.

But it you have the GUID of an item then the EA Navigator has a button to quickly select the item corresponding to this GUID.

Geert

[SadBunny]

Thanks for your information, Geert!

I'll definitely take a look at the navigator, although TBH the "open guid" will probably suffice for most of my colleagues. I hadn't even found that function.

Thanks again.

[Uffe]

Hello,

I wrote a handler for this a couple of years ago. Mine was pretty fancy and allowed you to create external links to all sorts of things in an EA project, was able to connect to multiple projects, had some session control stuff so you didn't end up with multiple EA clients all connected to the same project, and some other goodies like that.

But any reasonably skilled programmer can put a simple version together in a couple of days.

/Uffe