Sparx Systems Forum

Enterprise Architect => Suggestions and Requests => Topic started by: Paolo F Cantoni on October 02, 2006, 06:58:25 pm

Title: LocalPaths - consistency
Post by: Paolo F Cantoni on October 02, 2006, 06:58:25 pm

Local Paths treatment is somewhat inconsistent.

It is possible, by various means, to place more than one local path within a file definition.  EA will allow you to expand each path separately, but not both at once.

Effectively, LocalPaths are forms of variables (expressions) which can be substituted.

My suggestion is that they follow the normal pattern for substitutable expressions:

1) recursively make any substitution within the definition itself
2) for any instance that contains substitutable expressions, substitute all expressions.

For example:

Definitions:

a = aaaaa
b= bbb%a%bbb

Instance::

c= ccc%a%cc%b%ccc

Result:

c=cccaaaaaccbbbaaaaabbbccc

All instances of the current (simplex) case would still behave as existing, but the more complex cases would behave more consistently.

At present, the result for c appears to depend on the order of definition:
one result might be:  c=cccaaaaacc%b%ccc
another result: c=ccc%a%ccbbb%a%bbbccc
there may well be other possible results..

Thoughts?  Votes?
Paolo

Title: Re: Local Paths - dialog sizing
Post by: Paolo F Cantoni on October 02, 2006, 09:24:47 pm

If you (Sparxians) are refactoring in this area, could the Local Paths dialog sizing be made sticky?

We have some very long local paths (partly becuase at present they need to be fully specified) and EVERY time we go into the dialog, it needs to be resizewd...

Thanx,
Paolo

Title: Re: LocalPaths - case sensitivity
Post by: Paolo F Cantoni on October 02, 2006, 09:32:29 pm

Are LocalPath IDs supposed to be case insensitive or not?

They appear to be case sensitive:

DataPointDAI and DataPointDai

- appear as two entires.  I'm not sure that should be so, and therefore welcome input...

Paolo

Title: Re: LocalPaths - consistency
Post by: Gary_Barnes on October 05, 2006, 09:34:34 pm

Further to the Local Paths debate.
We store our model as xmi files checked into a centralised CVS repository. Individual developers check the xmi files out of the repository into a local sandbox on their PC. Whilst the directory structure within the sandbox is always the same the root of the sandbox can vary depending on where the developer chooses to store it on their PC. I would like to use the Package Control feature in EA but it would appear that path is aways referenced back to the drive and therefore would need to be different on each PC. Is there someway to use a relative path? Can the local path feature be used for referencing the model files as well as the code files?

Gary.

Title: Re: LocalPaths - consistency
Post by: Eve on October 05, 2006, 11:09:29 pm

Gary, version control in EA always uses local paths.