Phase enum in EA?

[PatrickS]

I always felt bad about the simple Textfield "Phase" because I rather then typing some phantasy characters  I would like to create an explicit list of Phases and (ideally with extra Information such as Dates, but ok, that's not that necessary) use that one via a Dropdown list. Now I was surprised to find indeed in the help file for adding tagged values for Predefined Reference Data (http://www.sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/13.0/modeling_tools/predefinedreferencedata.html) an Option to bind a Tagged Value to the Phase Enum.
Is this an unfinished implementation idea? As I can find no place to edit such a list (at least not under configure->ProjectTypes, where else could I check?) and when using this enum in a Tagged Value following the help description
Type=Enum;
List=Phases;
it just doesn't show any list at all at the Tagged Values window (no Dropdown box, only TextBox)

[qwerty]

EA has a couple of those heritages. Once thought of as possible good idea, but in practice not really useful (like e.g. the root/view/package concept). Instead of hoping to get these things fixed, just find some work around. As you suggested, using a tagged value does a much better job. So you should implement modeling rules that introduce a phase TV and force using this instead of the phase in the properties. Unfortunately you can not customize EA dialogs (easily - except you develop you own GUI).

q.

[Uffe]

Hi Patrick,


It looks like the "phase" of an element was once intended to be expressed as an enum, but then that got ditched and replaced with a free-text field.

There is a table t_phase in the database; it is empty in a newly-created project (as opposed to, say, t_statustypes).
I have not been able to find a GUI to manipulate this table.
If you look at the project reference data export dialog, you can pick all the other data types that are defined in a project (constraint statuses & types, risk types, estimation factors, etc etc) -- but there is no selection for "phase types".

I did try to push some data into t_phase, and I can get something in there but it still doesn't show up in a "Phase" tagged value. Tagged values of that type don't even get an empty dropdown list, they get free-text fields -- meaning that EA doesn't understand them as enums at all.

So my conclusion is that the inclusion of the "phase" in the list of reference data types is a result of the left hand not knowing what the right hasn't done.

HTH,


/Uffe

[PatrickS]

Thanks Uffe and Qwerty:

EA has a couple of those heritages. Once thought of as possible good idea, but in practice not really useful (like e.g. the root/view/package concept)...

It looks like the "phase" of an element was once intended to be expressed as an enum, but then that got ditched and replaced with a free-text field....

Hm. Thanks for your analysis of the problem. Strange that Sparx doesn't fix it, at least remove the seduction of the mention of a list. Would be surprised if many are working with  the phase free text field - in the era of Scrum and Sprint plannings etc. In the Generate Documentation Dialog, Option Tab, there are nice UI-based filter options with >, >=, <= which tells me that peple really work with it. But I cannot rename a phase, attribute one to an element etc., so the concept seems to be totally immature after so many versions of EA. I will start a new thread in the "Sugggestions and Requests" compartment.