Messages

1

General Board / Re: Underlined characters in RTF documents

« on: January 07, 2008, 01:20:58 am »

I have the same problem using OpenOffice.org in Windows.

For what I've understood, this is not a Sparx problem. I think that the real problem here is OpenOffice.org and its style incompatibilities with some file types (like MS Word, for example). In my case, even the generated fields appear corrupt in OpenOffice and that I can guarantee that is a reported bug in OpenOffice.org (opened a long time ago: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=53221).

I don't think there's much to do in this issue... Nevertheless, if someone knows how to fix this it would be very useful.  

Regards

2

General Board / Re: Meaning of some database fields

« on: December 06, 2007, 01:52:08 am »

Hi,

so, can anyone answer questions 1 to 7?  


Regards

3

General Board / Re: Meaning of some database fields

« on: November 26, 2007, 02:11:28 am »

Once again I apologize for such a long post, but I think it's better to ask all of this in only one place than to spread through several posts.
Of course, my intention was never to see this completely answered at the first reply, but more of a "I put this here and, hopefully, people will come by and give their contribute".

Anyway, I really thank to KP for the valuable input. 3 down, 7 to go

I think that this mapping should be somewhere in the documentation, but I also understand that there are areas more important than this, so that's why I've asked it here.
I already have a lot of this done (I'm only missing the information that I've asked) so, I wouldn't mind to pass it to be included somehow and somewhere in the documentation. That way I would also receive feedback on whether it's correct or not

Once again, thanks for your input, and I hope my other questions could be answered as well as the 3 that have been addressed


PS: I'm in Portugal, so here is GMT. That's the reason for posting my first message when someone in Australia was entering a "fabulous" weekend

4

General Board / Meaning of some database fields

« on: November 23, 2007, 02:42:50 am »

Hi,

I'm currently doing a mapping between the data that can appear in a RTF document and their location in the EA database (I have my EA projects located in a remote SQL Server).

I have managed to understand the location (in terms of corresponding table, column and necessary join data) of most of the fields, but I couldn't find some of them:

1 - Several objects can have Stereotype and StereotypeEx fields in the RTF. What's the difference between this 2? No table has a field named "StereotypeEx"...

2 - Where are located the Element.BaseClasses, Element.IsLocked, Element.IsNew, Element.FullName, Element.Realizes and Element.Tag properties in the database?

3 - One of the possibilities in the RTF for the Element tag is the CustomProperties tag. Where is this information in the database?

4 - Each Element can have its Issues. I understand that this can be stored in table t_objectproblems with ProblemType = 'Issue'. But, in this case, where is the History field? There is no such field in that table.

5 - Each Element can have its Tasks. I know that 'system level' tasks are stored in t_tasks table. How can I relate each one of these with an element or where are the tasks of each element?

6 - Each Element can have Connectors. These can have information about their Source and Target elements. How can I access the following fields of Source (or Target) connectors: ConnSource.Cardinality, ConnSource.End, ConnSource.Ordering, ConnSource.Scope and ConnSource.TargetScope?

7 - Each Element can have Attributes. How can I access these attributes' following fields: Att.Alias, Att.Collection, Att.FK, Att.IsDerived, Att.Multiplicity, Att.NotNull, Att.PK and Att.Unique?

8 - Each Element can have EmbeddedElements. These are elements of certain types (Ports, Pins, ObjectNodes, etc). I think I can access them by looking for their type and their parent object. Am I right? If yes, how can I know the complete list of Embedded Elements' types?

9 - Each Element can have Methods. These are stored in table t_operations. How can I access the field Meth.Alias? t_operations doesn't have this column...

10 - Each method can have Parameters, and each Parameter can have Tagged Values. There is a table named t_operationtag, but this has the Tagged Values of a Method and not of a Method's Parameter. How can I access these Tagged Values?


I'm sorry for such a long post, but I don't know any kind of explained specification of the database schema used by EA projects...
I've managed to find all other data that is possible to insert from RTF templates (defined in the RTF template editor) by looking at the help in the automation section (to get a more clear view of what each field meant) and by manually inspecting the database schema and the stored data to understand how the mapping between RTF and source data is done (does anyone knows if this kind of information is available??)

Any input will be very appreciated.

Regards.

5

General Board / Re: Links custom properties

« on: November 22, 2007, 06:55:01 am »

Denis,

I was doing something related to this only yesterday.

Sadly, I can confirm that custom properties are still documented as read-only. Even more sadly, I can confirm that the documentation is still correct in this regard.

You'll have to do something like open a second channel to the database via something like OLEDB, then update the fields yourself. Be careful until you know exactly what to put in the fields.

David

I'm currently trying to do exactly this (extract the values of the custom properties from the DBMS) but I can't find the place where they are...

Having the ID of an object/element, how can I access its custom properties and their values??

Regards.

6

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: Automation stops

« on: December 20, 2007, 03:28:55 am »

Hi,

so, one of the long shots worked

I tried tweaking the image limit in EA and didn't work. Same thing if I reloaded the project from time to time. The process keeped stopping after 445 diagrams.

The last tip worked: I'm disconnecting from EA (exiting the process) and then reconnecting every 400 diagrams and I've managed to get to the end.

What does this mean? That there is some kind of memory issue or something related with the resources when EA is under heavy usage? Is this a known bug?

I've also tried to generate these diagrams from the EA reporting engine and never got to the end. It crashed somewhere in the middle of the process. I've also noted that it crashed faster if I had the EA window visible. If I minimized it, then the process would last longer (but never got to the end of it, though).

Thank you very much for the "long shots"  

Regards.

7

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: Automation stops

« on: December 19, 2007, 08:53:19 am »

The PutDiagramImageToFile method also uses the clipboard? I thought only PutDiagramImageOnClipboard used the clipboard...

And if it used the clipboard, wouldn't the next call to the method simply replace the existing clipboard content?

8

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Automation stops

« on: December 19, 2007, 07:47:11 am »

Hi,

I'm using EA automation to generate diagram images.
In my EA project I have an enormous number of requirements (2300) and each requirement has its own diagram.
The project is in a SQL Server repository.

I'm calling PutDiagramImageToFile so that I can have a file in disk with each diagram.

But this process stops after the generation of 445 diagrams...(yes, it's always after 445 diagrams and I've already deleted some of the first ones to see if there was some sort of problem with them, but this number keeps unchanged). The PutDiagramImageToFile of the 446th call returns true but there is no file in disk...

I tried to generate diagrams also from a local .eap file and the reporting mechanism also stopped with some errors ("The resource was unavailable" and something related with the clipboard) and EA crashed.

Is there any kind of limitation in terms of the memory used by the EA.exe process or, more strangely, in terms of the number of diagrams that is generated (it is a little bit strange that, using automation, the number of correctly generated files is always the same...). Could it be that there are appearing the same small dialog windows with the errors that appeared when I tried to generate a report?

Regards

9

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: DBMS and diagram images

« on: October 17, 2007, 11:10:21 pm »

Hmm,

the idea of an add-in that stores the images in the database when you save the project sounds interesting...is this what you were talking about?

You see, this is supposed to be part of a web app for generating custom reports and I would really like if I didn't need using automation on the part of document generation/update...if all of the data was in the database it would be much cleaner and the images are the only thing that aren't.

Regards

10

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / DBMS and diagram images

« on: October 16, 2007, 01:32:12 am »

Hi,

I've been analysing the structure of an EA database and I think that the diagram images (i.e. what you can export to *.jpg or *.gif) are not stored.
What is stored is the data of the objects and connectors (like dimensions) that is latter used, I think, by EA to display the images.
I would like to have access to the diagram images to insert in the documentation being produced. With all this, I think my only chance would be automation to generate the images and then put them inside the docs.

Can anyone confirm this? Is there some way to get the images without using EA automation (with direct access to SQL database)?

Regards.

11

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Automation and ASP.NET

« on: October 01, 2007, 01:43:47 am »

Hi,

I'm trying use EA automation from an ASP.NET 2.0 page.
I've tried two methods for launching EA:

Code: [Select]

Object o = Server.CreateObject("EA.Project");
and

Code: [Select]

EA.Repository r = new EA.RepositoryClass();

With both methods I see the EA.exe process appearing but doing nothing (no CPU usage). After a certain amount of time, the connection process is aborted with the following exception:

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {8667FE5E-6D96-400A-AF0A-15C29F94DFCD} failed due to the following error: 80080005.

I've put the ASPNET user as capable of launching and acessing EA (through the configuration of the EA.App DCOM component).

Has anyone managed to do this? What am I doing wrong? What am I missing?

Any help would be extremely welcome...

Regards.