Messages

1

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Finer control over model content in RTF docume

« on: July 05, 2007, 07:24:47 pm »

Thanks for the ideas, I had a go with them, and although I think they should work, they unfortunately don't.

What I tried doing was moving elements into other packages and then marking those packages as 'Exclude package from RTF reports', I also tried setting status' and excluding elements with the given status, all to no avail.

The problem is that when you set up an RTF template and choose to report on Connector-->Source/Target-->Element, the document generator does not apply any of the filters to the elements at the end of the connector. This means that you can either choose to report on all source/target connectors for all the elements in your RTF document or none. This is the basis for my request.

BTW, virtual documents also don't work, for a similar reason, but mostly because they work at the package level, which is not fine-grained enough for what I'm trying to achieve.

Of course I can always choose to set up the template to include the connectors and then post-edit the output, or populate some other element attribute with the information I want to report on, but it kind of defeats the purpose for using the generator in the first place...

2

Suggestions and Requests / Finer control over model content in RTF documents

« on: July 05, 2007, 01:16:36 pm »

I've been using EA for several years now and have found it to be a very useful tool and the RTF editor has certainly improved significantly over that time. But if there is one area that I've hit over and over again in the editor, it is the lack of the ability to have greater control over what is and isn't included in the content of a given document.

Primarily this comes up when I've got a package/model with different types of elements and connectors and I only want certain types of connections or elements on the other end of the connection to be shown in the document.

Here is an example of what I mean:

I have a use case model where a given use case has associations with actors and other use cases (which are 'included' in the use case). In my document I want to list the actors in one section and included use cases in another. However, because I don't have the fine control I need, it is impossible to do this. I can't tell the document template 'only show this type of connected element here' or 'only show elements with this stereotype here'.

I've found that this situation is the biggest limitation with the RTF editor (and it comes up more often that you might think) and a feature that addresses this would, I think, be very useful.

3

Suggestions and Requests / More filter options when generating RTF documents

« on: August 18, 2005, 07:16:43 pm »

This may depend on exactly how clever you are trying to be when generating documents out of EA, but one of the things I come up against time and time again is that I want to have a lot more control over how I filter the content of the documents I generate.

If you look at what the RTF generator lets you filter on (old or new) it is limited to date, package phase or element status. Given that you can also capture all sorts of other metadata about an element such as stereotype, priority, difficulty etc, etc, I think it would be incredibily useful to be able to filter on this information when generating documents.

I'll also go one step further here and suggest that what would also be very useful is the ability to filter content based on types of connectors and/or stereotypes associated with connectors. The reason for this is that I often have fairly complex models where elements are connected to other elements in different ways and I am often only interested in documenting certain types and combiniations of relationships at any point in time. At the moment the best you can do is generate documentation for all related elements regardless of the type of connector.

Currently, what I frequently have to do is post-edit my generated documentation to remove content simply because the filter options are not sophisticated enough, which I find very, very annoying.

How do others feel about this?

4

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Native support for Subversion

« on: March 23, 2005, 12:32:12 pm »

Yes, it was a few weeks ago when I posted this, but no response from Sparx as yet. It would be nice to know if it is in their roadmap... :-/

5

Suggestions and Requests / Native support for Subversion

« on: January 09, 2005, 08:04:28 pm »

I realise the same topic has been raised in the general board but it hasn't been answered by Sparx there, so on behalf of my company we would really like to know if there are any plans to natively support Subversion within EA as a version control tool?

Thanks

Michael

6

General Board / Re: RTF Generator and headings/titles

« on: October 26, 2005, 08:30:01 pm »

You are probably best of staying away from the new RTF generator anyway, there are still a lot[/u] of bugs in it, even though it has been out for a while now and the same problems keep appearing build after build...  

7

General Board / Re: External Requirements with RTF-generator

« on: June 09, 2005, 04:49:35 pm »

I posted the same question previously but at that time no one replied . However it seemed fairly clear to me that this was a bug and I raised a bug request for Sparx.

They have since come back to me and said that this is a problem and is going to be fixed in a future release. It is unfortunate because if you use this feature of EA, not being able to generate this documentation is a pain (to say the least).

One work around that I have found is to use the 'Connector' and 'Target Element', the main problem with this is that any other connections apart from realisations also get picked up, but I guess it is better than nothing...

8

General Board / Re: RTF, MS-Word and templates

« on: May 30, 2005, 02:50:27 pm »

Just so you know you are not alone, I get a message that tells me 'Fields are nested too deeply' when I do a similar thing (i.e. imbed my EA generated rtf document as a linked file in Word).

I think there are still a number of quirks to be worked thru with the new RTF generator tool.

9

General Board / linked requirements in the new rtf generator

« on: May 20, 2005, 09:53:56 pm »

I've been investigating using the new RTF generation functionality and it mostly seems to work as I expect except for one bit.

EA lets you create link requirements to elements in your model (such as use cases) thru realisation links and, in the old document generator you can choose to show these under the relevant element (e.g. use case).

However, unless I'm missing something there doesn't seem to be a way of doing this in the new generator. I had initially thought that selecting 'Requirement' under 'Element' would cause this to happen, but this doesn't seem to work. Has anyone figured out a way of doing this? Or is it a bug/missing feature?

10

General Board / Re: What is coming up in EA 5.0?

« on: April 27, 2005, 03:48:57 pm »

All this stuff is great, but does anyone know when this release is coming?  

I ask because the WYSIWYG editor is very high on my list of desiriable features and for at least one thing I have asked for in the documentation generation area, the response I got was that it would be handled in the new WYSIWYG editor which was due at the end of the first quarter of 2005 which obviously has now passed...