Deployment Diagrams

[AndrewW]

I’m new to EA, so hopefully there is a simple answer to this and I’m just being silly.
I am trying to create a deployment diagram which shows our entire environment and all the communications (relationships)  between the nodes for each of our applications and actors.


I understand that this diagram will be huge and unreadable; however this would be the master diagram.

The above part looks fairly easy

The part I am having difficulty with is the next section.

I plan to set up individual diagrams for each of the applications, and then by placing the actor for the application on the diagram I am looking for EA to automatically draw this diagram based on the master diagram.

I had considered using Tagged values, but I can’t find a way to draw a based on tagged values in nodes.

I have also looked at relationships (with add relationships), however although this worked to a degree, all the relationships for all applications are followed and not just the one for the application of choice. Additionally the number of levels to follow is limited to 5, so not all the nodes are included.  I could net find a way to set a tag on the relation ships so I could say follow relationships for this app only

The above is the part I am having real difficulty with, However I have also discovered that alternate images appear to be dependant on the diagram and not the node, as the alternate images being set in the master diagram are not shown on the individual app diagrams

Any help would be appreciated

Andrew

[Sunshine]

Not sure if its the tool or the Enterprise Architecture discipline you are new to. Its not clear what you are trying to achieve and who the diagrams are for - sorry. Appreciate its difficult to articulate in a forum like this.

I suggest standing back and just asking yourself what viewpoints do I need and who needs them? For instance deployment diagrams are often used by IT Admin staff to deploy applications on some end user devices and servers. So these diagrams often contain artifacts and nodes showing a database installed on a database server and application artifacts like war, jar and ear files deployed on application server or workstation.

At a higher level of abstraction you might want to show communications between IT systems to meet a certain business process(ess) but may not want to show everything.

My advice would be to do various diagrams for each system and the bigger picture diagram can be created later. You might like to have a packaged component represent an IT system and under that have a deployment diagram for an application with all its artifacts, components and nodes. Perhaps even a context diagram for each IT system showing what it connects to. You could then just drag all the IT systems onto one diagram and have all the relationships shown for the big picture.  Then auto layout and auto route that diagram. If you want to do some auto generation of the big picture you could use JScript or VBScript.
 
Hope that helps.  

[KP]

A technique you might find useful: go to your big picture, ctrl+click all the individual elements you want to show on your small picture, ctrl+C, go to your small picture, ctrl+V.

[Thelonius]

Do UML Deployment Diagrams have "actor" on them?

What would the Actor's relationship, role or process be with an entity in a Deployment Diagram?

What would the "relationship" connector define if we were to connect an Actor to a Component, Node or Device on a Deployment Diagram?

Even ArchiMate diagrams would probably not show an Actor directly associated with a Node, Infrastructure Server, or Infrastructure Interface.

(On the other hand, I have put "actors" on a Component Diagram...)