As you may be aware, I'm back on my "Metatype vs Type & Stereotype hobbyhorse.
In the past, we created mainly "Architectural" Repositories. Now we're embarking on a new "Voyage of the Starship Enterprise" and moving into "instance" models where we are possibly creating a "digital twin" of the enterprise (within a bounded scope). Consequently, we are now creating items that correspond (for example) to the Countries, National Administrative Divisions, business sites, legal entities that we deal with (or in). We can, using the repository, say things like in "Country X, we operate 2 companies, in two regions, at three sites". "Site X, operates in region D of country M, using currency Q. It is operated by our company J providing Service T under contract K to company E".
I'm sure you get the picture.
Our user base will expand from mainly technical (IT) users to "business people". Business people don't think in terms of type "Activity", stereotype "ArchiMate_BusinessProcess" - that is, type+stereotype, they think in terms of "Business Process" - the metatype.
In previous versions, the Project Search would return the metatype in the Type column (IF the BROWSER was in the correct state vis-à-vis the returned items - just think on the coding required to achieve that inconsistency). I'm not sure what the result is with v15.1 (it came in silently and probably exited the same way).
Anyway, this is a request to formally add the metatype field to the field chooser to allow the metatype to be formally returned. We could then dispense with the Type and Stereotype fields (if there wasn't an existing metatype defined for the Type+Stereotype combination EA could emit <Type>+<Stereotype>). This ("Business Process") would be more meaningful to the general user than "Activity"+"ArchiMate_BusinessProcess".
Reported,
Thoughts?
Paolo
