eaDocX viability?

[Thelonius]

Has anyone used the third-party plug-in eaDocX on a continuous basis for commercial work?

We want especially to import data from Excel spreadsheets in Sparx and export from Sparx to Excel (or .csv). Does eaDocX work as advertised - or should we stick with native Sparx .csv import / export?

We're thinking the native .csv import / export facility in Sparx is a bit basic.

(Recognising that the developers of eaDocX probably monitor this forum ... )

[Geert Bellekens]

If you are familiar with SQL you might want to try my free excel importer as an alternative: https://bellekens.com/ea-excel-import-export/

Geert

[Richard Freggi]

I use Geert's Excel importer very often in corporate environment, to import more than 300K elements into EA.  I can confirm it very robust. The only change I had to make to Geert's code was replacing all integer datatypes to long so it could handle the large number of elements (took 5 minutes to do it).

[Thelonius]

With respect to Geert's excellent work and his generosity in contributing his knowledge to this forum, I'm disinclined to have to re-learn SQL in order to do something that should be a key capability of an architecture modelling tool -- AND should be implemented by the tool vendor in an elegant, robust, reliable manner.  The native Sparx .csv import / export facility is in desperate need of remediation.

If there was a well-supported third-party plug-in that worked -- and made .csv import / export easy. We'd be happy to pay for it. The EADocX add on is -- as far as I can see -- dead in the water. I'm told an update is 'in the works, but with no firm delivery date' ... which means 'dead in the water'.

I think my perspective is out of line with the majority community of Sparx users. For technical software design, where the people using Sparx are expert software engineers and coders, they are free to build code on top of Sparx to their heart's content. However, we are seeking to use Sparx in a different mode -- as a full-stack enterprise architecture knowledge repository. We present summary analytical visualised artefacts to CxO execs and hundreds of business and technology subject matter experts. We recognise that we are not Sparx's core target market. We are on the periphery. This is not going to change.

When people say "you can write the code yourself to get Sparx to do that" ... what we actually hear is "Sparx is not the right tool for what you want to do".

Which is sad ... because Sparx is ubiquitous in the global market place because of it's price point. There is huge latent demand going unmet. It would not take a disproportionate amount of work to make Sparx far more capable for what we need it to do. An opportunity going begging. There are others like us in the global market place.

Because of this, we are migrating later this year to Orbus iServer365. We'll definitely keep corporate Sparx licensing for project solution architecture work, for which it is well suited.

My narrative here is probably not of great interest to Sparx or to the Sparx Systems Forum. Apologies.

[qwerty]

Well, at least it confirms that my thinking is not just in that brain sitting on this very chair here in my room. Sad, but true. Someway making me feel not as bad :-)

q.

[Takeshi K]

Hello Thelonius,

Have you tried MD Integration for Microsoft Office?
https://www.sparxsystems.com/products/mdg/int/office/office-integration.html
(You may need to convert CSV to Excel xlsx before importing.)

It might help your situation.

HTH,