Sparx Systems Forum
Enterprise Architect => Suggestions and Requests => Topic started by: philchudley on February 16, 2012, 02:40:10 am
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Hi All
Am I the only user of EA who finds the Workflow scripts feature in EA, rather disappointing and somewhat misleading?
In my opinion (unless I have missed something), these scripts do not implement workflow at all, rather they allow the checking of access / edit to Phase, Status, Tag, Version fields ONLY.
Personally (apart from tags) I find these properties little used.
What I was expecting and indeed what I would like to see, is a means to provide total read only access to individual elements (including diagrams and packages), thereby providing a workflow capability. For example, a repository could be populated with a structure using an MDG, and until a certain section was completed and signed off, the remainder of the structure would be read only.
I realise that this effect can be achieved using version control (in particular TFS), but it would be really great if the Workflow scripts lived up to their name.
But what do you think?
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I haven't used (or even looked at) Workflow scripts. But Phil, you've been around EA long enough to know that it doesn't do anything properly.
Somewhat paradoxically, it's (sort of) one of its strengths. If you can't get it to do what you want one way, you often can get at it another way.
But to your point... I'm sure you're correct in your assessment and I agree that workflow scripts should provide the ability to control workflow through a scenario in the manner that you suggest.
One of the problems I see in getting greater acceptance of a modelling tool such as EA in the wider enterprise is getting punters to enter metadata easily and SAFELY.
Being able to create "Wizards" to help manage this and allow non-technical people to update metadata without corrupting things (by accident or EAUI) is what I'd be looking for.
My AUD$0.05
Paolo
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sigh!
q.