Sparx Systems Forum
Enterprise Architect => Suggestions and Requests => Topic started by: Paolo F Cantoni on April 24, 2019, 05:18:49 pm
-
Now that we (at our installation) have the ability to manage the relationships inferred by Visual Enclosure. Diagrams involving (multiple) items enclosed within another item are becoming more commonplace in our repository.
It occurred to me that it would be cool to extend the [Alt+Z] functionality to resize the enclosing item to the set of enclosed items (with a default margin). If the enclosing item has a name, the enclosure should begin below the name.
Thoughts?
Paolo
-
Absolutely. More features make a tool more useful.
You might notice the sarcastic timbre. But honestly, the situation will only change after the revolution has come and the whole (or the responsible part of) EA's development has been put at the wall (I can't shake it off, still). skiwi is also still at it (digging posts from 2004) but less and less frequent. I for myself gave up to 98% (just leaving my 2 cent) complaining. The only thing that changed was my down vote statistics. Haha. Look at yours.
q.
-
Absolutely. More features make a tool more useful.
You might notice the sarcastic timbre. But honestly, the situation will only change after the revolution has come and the whole (or the responsible part of) EA's development has been put at the wall (I can't shake it off, still). skiwi is also still at it (digging posts from 2004) but less and less frequent. I for myself gave up to 98% (just leaving my 2 cent) complaining. The only thing that changed was my down vote statistics. Haha. Look at yours.
q.
Well, both Skiwi and I are antipodeans so, I guess, we're naturally more positive.
If you don't ask, you don't get.
Since it's now obvious that the more fundamental issues aren't going to be changed soon, we might as well chip away at the periphery.
Paolo
-
Absolutely. More features make a tool more useful.
You might notice the sarcastic timbre. But honestly, the situation will only change after the revolution has come and the whole (or the responsible part of) EA's development has been put at the wall (I can't shake it off, still). skiwi is also still at it (digging posts from 2004) but less and less frequent. I for myself gave up to 98% (just leaving my 2 cent) complaining. The only thing that changed was my down vote statistics. Haha. Look at yours.
q.
Well, both Skiwi and I are antipodeans so, I guess, we're naturally more positive.
If you don't ask, you don't get.
Since it's now obvious that the more fundamental issues aren't going to be changed soon, we might as well chip away at the periphery.
Paolo
It's obvious Sparx EA doesn't have capacity to improve the good product they've built over the past few years (likely due to stale management, incapable of operating in 21st century); fortunately, competitors have risen over the past few years (BizzDesign for example) that DO pay attention to customer feedback, which means that if it weren't for competitors' sky-high prices, Sparx EA certainly would not feature on any major organisation's radar.
"You don't ask, you don't get" is a true statement; when it comes to Sparx EA, this mantra shows itself to be a useless waste of time since feedback, recommendations, requests, bugs are ignored and left unacknowledged, lost to the ether (again, highly likely due to staid management or development team that are comfortable in their stale jobs; fresh ideas shut out like sunshine to a vampire).
Try sending the team a mail of thanks / praise for ONE good thing you see in v15 and observe whether such good feedback is acknowledged by the team or management... (don't hold your breath)
"Might as well chip away at the periphery". Do one better: look at competitors on the market, try their products and compare against Sparx EA. If competitors are better suited, then an architect's choice is simple... adopt the competitor product. If not, then Sparx Stockholm Syndrome ("SSS") is the only reward for those architects / modellers who choose to frustrate their workday with Sparx EA while attempting to try help to make the product better via feature requests, bugs or suggestions or even good praise.
-
The only thing that changed was my down vote statistics. Haha. Look at yours.
lol, look at mine !
-
You're poking in open wounds too often. I heard rumors that you can buy clicks in China. Maybe someone (whom could I mean?) got a good offer to get your bug lists down voted?
q.
-
You're poking in open wounds too often. I heard rumors that you can buy clicks in China. Maybe someone (whom could I mean?) got a good offer to get your bug lists down voted?
q.
;D one pokes in the wounds because the mind boggles at the poor response shown towards you, me and other paying users who want the company to fix glaring issues, and improve the poor usability / UI to enable the product to fly. Come on! Version 15 and STILL the product seems designed for operation in the early 80's!? (clicking hundreds of times to achieve one task... such "a revolution"). Where expected norms in Windows apps are abandoned and instead "it's not a bug, it's quirky" gangsta implementation is adopted!? Where new dialogs are added to the product that look like a 5-year old programmer was hired to add them!? (i.e. no consistency such as embedding wide windows into Add-in windows and providing NO at-the-bottom-of-the-window scroll bars). Features not tested before delivery, customers identity QA bugs, log them, aaaaannnd into some Sparx black hole they go...
So, a thought remains: instead of buying clicks in China ( ;) ), better to get open source community together to build a free product that gives architects, designers and BAs exactly what they've been requesting for years; a tool that enables them to work efficiently, QUICKLY, in a no-mess-no-fuss type of way; ways that put joy into our hearts because the implementation is elegant, simple, appreciated. How is this company unable to provide such things after almost 20 years in business and countless bug lists or feature requests? (what's the point of the user forum if the company doesn't glean direction from it?)
Why one, therefore, pokes into the wounds is because even with 4 SENIOR, experienced, and passionate developers, it IS STILL possible to achieve a high-quality product, YET (based on simple mathematics below and daily using the product) evidence shows the product is sorely languishing in poor design choices / implementations; my mind therefor reaches HTTP 404. Does not compute.
- The About Us (https://sparxsystems.com/about.html) page declares over 740K+ registered users (one assumes each user has paid a license);
- average license cost of say, $150 USD p/a; total registered user license fee = ~$175M USD;
- average SENIOR developer in Australia, $85K AUD (https://www.seek.com.au/software-developer-jobs);
- 5 developers cost ~$320K AUD (add a bit for pension, super-annuation etc) totalling ~$360K AUD;
- leaves us with (1 USD = 1.44 AUD), $252M AUD - $360K AUD = $251.6M AUD.
That's a fair chunk of change, plenty of financial wiggle room to improve QA / Devs / UI design team etc. So, ultimately poking around is merely asking experienced forum users for their experience, perhaps even to incite them into action, contemplation: is the product REALLY worth an investment if conditions X and Y and Z and AA ... all hold true? Like you, like Mulder and Scully, "I want to believe" (...that the team is responsive, will bring requested change, that version 15/16 will be the product version to delight users).
-
Look at your karma. You're on the best way to inherit skiwi!
Only kidding. It's hard to get me there, but after so many years seeing complaints and suggestions just go down the gully made me, well, not desperate but make me realize that I can spend my time with better things.
q.
-
Look at your karma. You're on the best way to inherit skiwi!
Only kidding. It's hard to get me there, but after so many years seeing complaints and suggestions just go down the gully made me, well, not desperate but make me realize that I can spend my time with better things.
q.
:D... 8) Karma, like most things in life (except taxes and general retail prices) goes up and it goes down, the best one can do when using Sparx EA: Gully Edition, is
(1) find like minded forum members to conglomerate pains and features into a "We the users demand from Sparx the following.... failure to do so will result in diminished revenue and eventual long-term financial starvation", OR
(2) try be part of The Change for Sparx EA (logging bugs and feature requests), OR
(3) [possibly the easiest option for most] leave and use competitor products, OR
(4) contact competitors, discuss their product features and describe existing vendor pains [competitors would obviously lap up opportunity to outshine existing vendor; it's almost like a love-affair, wooing your wallet away from your existing "lover" that doesn't give a damn about you no more]
Do you regularly use the tool in question or have you found architecture modelling Zen in another (if so, for the love of Great Architecture Tooling, declare It's Name! so we too may too)?
-
The power of youth. Well, I got tired of fighting. Still using EA since it's the limping one eyed having cataract amongst the blind. Anyhow, hold up the flame. One day there might be the Elysium.
q.
P.S. Look at my posts count. You still can't say I had not been enthusiastic.
-
I feel like you are being too harsh here.
OK I agree that there are (a lot of) things that could have been done better, but...
- EA is still the best general purpose modelling tool out there
- EA licenses are dirt cheap
- There have been a lot of really good improvements over the last 10 years. Some of them (such as the Ribbons and all the graphical changes) may seem pointless to us oldtimers, but if they would do that, the GUI would look like it ran away from the early nineties (See MagicDraw or MEGA to see what I mean)
- I do have a number of bugs, and a few feature requests that have been fixed/implemented.
Can Sparx do better? Yes I certainly think so.
Is Sparx the worst software company out there? Not even close.
Geert
-
I feel like you are being too harsh here.
OK I agree that there are (a lot of) things that could have been done better, but...
- EA is still the best general purpose modelling tool out there
- EA licenses are dirt cheap
- There have been a lot of really good improvements over the last 10 years. Some of them (such as the Ribbons and all the graphical changes) may seem pointless to us oldtimers, but if they would do that, the GUI would look like it ran away from the early nineties (See MagicDraw or MEGA to see what I mean)
- I do have a number of bugs, and a few feature requests that have been fixed/implemented.
Can Sparx do better? Yes I certainly think so.
Is Sparx the worst software company out there? Not even close.
Geert
Start->Search Model:
select * from t_document order by t_document.elementid;
:-X
-
Start->Search Model:
select * from t_document order by t_document.elementid;
:-X
I'm not sure what you are trying to prove.
If I execute that query in the scratch pad it show the data as expected.
In the search term field for simple search it returns nothing.
Geert
-
Start->Search Model:
select * from t_document order by t_document.elementid;
:-X
I'm not sure what you are trying to prove.
If I execute that query in the scratch pad it show the data as expected.
In the search term field for simple search it returns nothing.
Geert
I was just about to delete that post as a bit inconsiderate, as it was based on a reaction to an investigation into Project Events. Not trying to prove anything, just another EA assumption broke for me this morning when trying to create a report.. then i read this thread and felt compelled to share the above.
I know it seems to go against best advice to use EA for any feature other than making UML repositories, but i want to use them, and so i expect them work or something. At the project level you can record:
Tasks select * from t_tasks Issues select * from t_issues and events select StrContent from t_document where t_document.DocType like 'event_calendar';<insert XML parsing SQL query here?>
My search was in my scratch repository, where i have been playing with features. The t_document table is doing more than just managing linked documents. The post was because there are document records that just :-X me with their implications.
-
@timoc Why didn't you open your own thread? Our "improvement rants" (or whatever they can be called) are more related with the OP's intention than what I see from your question - which I still don't get.
q.
-
I can definitely agree the the database is a big mess. :-\
In part because at some point they decided not to change the database structure anymore. It is virtually unchanged since 2005.
All the new stuff has been stuffed in other places such as t_xref, t_document.
In other places they used some fields to add key/value pairs (e.g. StyleEx fields) or xml strings.
The positive thing about that is that you can open a model from 2005 with version 15, and vice versa, you can open a model created with version 15 with EA version 6.5
Geert
-
@timoc Why didn't you open your own thread? Our "improvement rants" (or whatever they can be called) are more related with the OP's intention than what I see from your question - which I still don't get.
q.
Yeh, I'm way off topic. I do plan post a thread once i have gotten it to do something usefull that i can share, and i will start another thread on the t_document table. "Improvement rants" might need their own forum from what i can see ;)
-
Lots of them. I did poke around in those tables quite a bit. So if you have a specific question, just ask. What I got so far was just that you found it "somewhat inconsistent". Well, I've been there quite some years ago.
q.
-
Lots of them. I did poke around in those tables quite a bit. So if you have a specific question, just ask. What I got so far was just that you found it "somewhat inconsistent". Well, I've been there quite some years ago.
q.
In essence, i have spent a good portion of my career as a Software engineer, and Architect working on old codebases, and systems, dragging them kicking and screaming into the light of the 20th and 21st centuries. During that time, i have seen my share of 'red flags'. With all of the best will in the world for the guys and gals on the development team, when i saw a 'Notes' field, containing xml fragments, themselves containing references to SQL element UUID's, alongside a 'Style field with even more element information in XML, in what seems to be a uuid key based lookup table, without database managed referential integrity... That is when i started to twitch :o.
Embedding XML in an SQL table, ok, that is Part 14 of the SQL Specification now, so :-\, maybe a sign of technical debt, deal with it and move on. This is not that. I now understand how i could have accidentally 'lost' a whole section of my team library. Specifically, this idea that a database model freeze+new features makes any kind of sense in these days of continuous database development needs to be addressed, I've shelved that rant for later posting when i can say something more constructive, and not sound like i'm just throwing aspersions from the peanut gallery.
-
Aw, where should I start my rant about that so-called database then?? If there were a chance I'd go for a visit to Australia I likely should have a bullet proof vest. It won't happen and I really do no longer care.
q.
-
Aw, where should I start my rant about that so-called database then?? If there were a chance I'd go for a visit to Australia I likely should have a bullet proof vest. It won't happen and I really do no longer care.
The spiders, snakes, or beer would likely kill you before you needed to rely on a vest. :-)
-
.... I really do no longer care.
q.
Stage 5 - Acceptance :). Not there myself yet.
-
Stage 5 - Acceptance :). Not there myself yet.
Interesting that you come up with Kübler-Ross. But indeed the 5 stages are what I've gone through. Maybe that when realizing the scenario I'd reached it earlier.
q.
-
Stage 5 - Acceptance :). Not there myself yet.
Interesting that you come up with Kübler-Ross. But indeed the 5 stages are what I've gone through. Maybe that when realizing the scenario I'd reached it earlier.
q.
Kübler-Ross is a metaphor i was given one time by a colleague who was trying to get me to stop banging my head against a wall of corporate indifference. We did eventually move on to stage 5 in that situation, but if i see a group get angry about something its a go-to model for seeing where people are at. I can tell the old hands here are stage 5, which implies way too much about the EA support model, but i will try to stay at stage 3 for as long as i am using EA :)
-
Death metaphors, which come to mind?
1) Monty Python's parrot sketch ("Listen, I tell you what's wrong with it: it's dead")
2) Tribal wisdom of the Dakota about riding a dead horse
3) Enterprise Architect
I have to think about the order of the list.
q.
-
Death metaphors, which come to mind?
1) Monty Python's parrot sketch ("Listen, I tell you what's wrong with it: it's dead")
2) Tribal wisdom of the Dakota about riding a dead horse
3) Enterprise Architect
I have to think about the order of the list.
q.
Ahhh.... there is stage 4 ;)
I always refer to the 5 stages [denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance] as the 5 stages of grief. I'm sure there is a bigger list of grief generating topics ;D.
I honestly did not know it was about grief over death until needed a link for that earlier thread.
-
It occurred to me that it would be cool to extend the [Alt+Z] functionality to resize the enclosing item to the set of enclosed items (with a default margin). If the enclosing item has a name, the enclosure should begin below the name.
Remember this
+1
-
Wow!
Having been on holiday in Central and Northern Australia for the last month and literally off-the-air for most of it (my wife didn't believe I could survive without the Internet ;D), my original post seems to have stirred up a hornets' nest!
Anyway, one of my aphorisms is: "Using EA in spite of EA; not because of it!" While it is still true, the balance is shifting.
We can but live in hope... My hope is that Sparx decides to harness the evident goodwill in the customer base.
The positive thing about that is that you can open a model from 2005 with version 15, and vice versa, you can open a model created with version 15 with EA version 6.5
Geert
Sounds like asking motor vehicles to respond to buggy whips.
Sometimes you just need to move on... In any case, while you can open the file, the semantics are quite different and thus the exercise is (effectively) pointless. (Yes Geert (), I know you were being sarcastic).
If Sparx asked the user base about usage, they might get a surprise (since they don't appear to have instrumentation and telemetry), they are flying a bit blind, surely?
Paolo
-
Yee-haw!
q.
-
Skiwi and I are antipodeans so, I guess, we're naturally more positive.
Must be Kiwis. You've got a good government.
Australians not very positive at the moment.
-
Agree.
I feel like you are being too harsh here.
OK I agree that there are (a lot of) things that could have been done better, but...
- EA is still the best general purpose modelling tool out there
- EA licenses are dirt cheap
- There have been a lot of really good improvements over the last 10 years. Some of them (such as the Ribbons and all the graphical changes) may seem pointless to us oldtimers, but if they would do that, the GUI would look like it ran away from the early nineties (See MagicDraw or MEGA to see what I mean)
- I do have a number of bugs, and a few feature requests that have been fixed/implemented.
Can Sparx do better? Yes I certainly think so.
Is Sparx the worst software company out there? Not even close.
Geert
-
Skiwi and I are antipodeans so, I guess, we're naturally more positive.
Must be Kiwis. You've got a good government.
Australians not very positive at the moment.
We have some of the world's highest house prices to income.