Possible to check differences through a web interface?

[miksko]

The Sparx client has tools for letting the user review changes and differences between two versions of a model; for example the current model and a baseline version.
Will someone who doesn't have the client, but just the web interfaces WebEA or ProLaborate, be able to do something similar? And if so, how?

[Geert Bellekens]

No, that requires the actual client.

Geert

[miksko]

Just as I suspected. Thanks for answering, Geert.

Mikael

[Nabil]

Hi Mikael, kind of late to respond, but I wanted to add that Prolaborate has a Versions Explorer mechanism which can be used to show the different versions of your EA model for Prolaborate users.

https://prolaborate.sparxsystems.com/resources/v5-documentation/version-explorer

The caveat is that it requires each version of the model to be maintained in its own separate repository. Not sure if it fits your use case, but figured it was worth mentioning.

Nabil

[Geert Bellekens]

Hi Mikael, kind of late to respond, but I wanted to add that Prolaborate has a Versions Explorer mechanism which can be used to show the different versions of your EA model for Prolaborate users.

https://prolaborate.sparxsystems.com/resources/v5-documentation/version-explorer

The caveat is that it requires each version of the model to be maintained in its own separate repository. Not sure if it fits your use case, but figured it was worth mentioning.

Nabil

Nabil,

Have you really tried to use that feature in the real world?
In my experience, clients who purchase Prolaborate are larger organizations that generally use a central database
They can't be creating a new repository for each "version" of each diagram.

For me this is a pure "sales" feature. It looks good in a demo, but it utterly useless in the real world.

Geert

[miksko]

Hi Mikael, kind of late to respond, but I wanted to add that Prolaborate has a Versions Explorer mechanism which can be used to show the different versions of your EA model for Prolaborate users.

https://prolaborate.sparxsystems.com/resources/v5-documentation/version-explorer

The caveat is that it requires each version of the model to be maintained in its own separate repository. Not sure if it fits your use case, but figured it was worth mentioning.

Hi Nabil,

Thanks for letting me know. It's an interesting feature and definitely useful, if we decide to go for this setup.

As Geert (but also your linked page) mentions, this feature requires one repository per version you want to track. You have the same problem when you're working in parallell on different versions of code. The developer is always able to run a certain version locally and display it for others. But in order for the stakeholders to test it themselves, that version has to be published to an application server. The application server in the Sparx case would be a ProCloud repository, which the stakeholders access trough ProLaborate.

We have had several discussions with LieberLieber -- producer of the change management tool LemonTree -- which is aimed towards Sparx users, for solving model change conflicts. Their tool is able to internally compare different versions of the model database, thus getting rid of the need for repositories. But in order to publish two different versions in parallell, you still have to stage two repositories. On the other hand, LieberLieber presented a solution where they automated the staging, synchronized it with Jira and closed repositories (in order to be reused) as soon as the Jira ticket was closed.

If I remeber correctly each license of the ProCloud server allows up to eight concurrent repositories, making it an economical restriction as well. In the end it might be wiser to still automate but let it lead to model reports being generated automatically. That won't help end-users to track changes, but it solves the need for concurrent repositories for review.

Cheers, Mikael