Messages

1

Suggestions and Requests / Relationship Matrix

« on: November 01, 2006, 11:42:07 am »

Hi

Having recently discovered the relationship matrix, I wanted to suggest some features that I would find very helpful.

In many of our diagrams we will NOT be giving a name to decision nodes, it just clutters the diagram (we will use the "Guard" text of the connectors to reveal the decisions being made).

So when we look at the relationship matrix and list requirements with decisons, we find that all decisions look the same in the matrix (i.e. the have no "name" text).

This makes it very hard to see what a decision does unless we right-clikc on it in the matrix.

So looking for a given decision is very time consuming.

So

1. How about an option that lets us name elelments, but supress the displaying of the name in diagrams, for example we could then tell EA to "Supress the display of names for Decision elements" this would then lets us name them and see them easily in the matrix, yet not clutter our activity diagrams.

or

2. If an element (e.g Decision) has no "name" text, then in the matrix display its "Alias" (if it has one). This will let us use Alias as a means of identifying Decisions (and other elements) in the relationship matrix, but (since Alias does not appear in diagrams) avoid cluttering the diagrams.

Personally I think elements should be forced to have names and that they should also have an optional label text. It is this label text that would then be seen in diagrams.

The name can then be used to identify elelments as it is now, but not be used to label them in diagrams etc, it being optional for the user to give a label.

One can envisage a setting too "Use Name As Label" which could be applied to either individual elements or types (eg Decisions, Requirements etc).

With such a setting, we could have this set for all elements, yet disable it for Decisions, this would cause Decisions to appear unnamed in diagrams, the point here being that "Label" is the text displayed in diagrams.

If a user fills in Label property then it gets displayed in diagram else it doesnt. But if user does not fill in Label BUT DOES set "Use Name As Label" then the element will appear in diagrams with its name.

Something like this would decouple names and labels so we could always have and refer to name, yet control what is and isnt seen in diagrams.

Thx
Hugh

2

Suggestions and Requests / Time Zone

« on: August 25, 2006, 10:54:14 am »

Can I suggest that time-zone (standard three letter code) be included one one's profile, this is a neater way to ensure each person's time details are understood.

Also since Sparx staff are located in Australia, it is unlikely that any of them will be reading this forum when I am posting because I am in the US east coast.

Perhaps Sparx can consider assigning some knowledgable representatives in other countries the role of "expert" and encourage these people to peruse the forum from time to time and respond to questions posted by customers?

What about a special forum specifically for evaluation, one that is structured to reflect the kind of isues and questions that evaluators encounter?

Part of the registration for this forum might include the users operating system, display resolution, etc so that Sparx staff can see at a glance all the important details about a user when they read his/her question.


If there is some other way that I can get timely responses to questions that emerge during evaluation, then please do tell me.



Thanks
Hugh

3

Suggestions and Requests / Reverse Engineering - Pause

« on: August 25, 2006, 11:51:06 am »

In the reverse engineering window, add a "Pause" button to allow user to suspend the revers processing.

Currently it runs on its own and diagnostics just scroll past.

It wd be neat to be able to pause this and then freely scroll up/down the diagnistics just to see what its happening, it may be that one may decide to cancel the whole conversion process but unless they can see and read at leisure they will miss this possibility.

H

4

Suggestions and Requests / Copy/Cut/Paste

« on: August 25, 2006, 07:18:43 am »

I have noticed that context menus in diagrams do not have any support for Copy/Cut/Paste and one must click on the main Edit menu in order to effect such operations.

This is quite tedious, so can you please consider adding these to the context menus used in diagram editing?

Thx

5

General Board / Re: "Project Transfer" on Trial Verion

« on: January 22, 2007, 10:26:30 am »

Hi

Did u resolve this, I am also having problem with this, my post was ubmitted to day in the General area, but I got no feedback yet.

Thx

6

General Board / HELP: Won't connect to SQL Server 2005

« on: January 22, 2007, 06:37:01 am »

OK First I previewed this and forgot to complete the "Subject" it complained and I totally lost all text in the post and must retype it all, this is terrible.

Now my real problem is that I cannot get EA trial edition to work with SQL Server 2005 Dev Edition on a Win XP Pro system, and I am due to demo this setup tomorrow and currently working from home.

I ran the sql setup script OK and when I got to EA start page and select "Connect to server..." all goes well (Test Connection works etc) until last step.

This is the step where EA asks to confirm/edit the name for the connection, when I do this and press OK I get a message box saying:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server [-2147217865]
Invalid object name 'usys_system'.

Naturally I am unable to proceed and this is a major problme for me.

Any help much appreciated.

H

7

General Board / Re: Several instances of an activity

« on: August 25, 2006, 06:58:16 am »

Your question overlaps mine a little I think, which is here:

http://www.sparxsystems.com.au/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=general;action=display;num=1156454323

H

8

General Board / Business Rules

« on: October 13, 2006, 06:18:42 am »

Hi

I notice the concept of business rules is discussed and appears all over in EA documentation and literature.

However I cannot find a "BusinessRule" element.

Our understanding of business rules is that they differ from requirements and provide a means for defining a business defintion or processing rule in a single place.

Other elements like decisions for example, can then realize not only requirements but also these rules, and the rule may be chnaged in a single place for the whole model to remain self-consistent.

Does this exist in EA?

Thanks
Hugh

9

General Board / Relationship Matrix - BUG?

« on: October 13, 2006, 06:46:06 am »

I was exploring the relationship matrix and noted several possible bugs.

1) Refresh does not always seem to work, and I was unable to refresh the appearance despite making chnages to each of the other input fields on this form.

2) If I right click on an empty cell, I very often get a context menu that should only pertain to cells WITH a relationship, but the cell is EMPTY and has never had a relationship set. (View Relationship thus has no effect)

The latter is very common and easy to reproduce, naturally a bug of this scope is a major weakness in deploying the tool for real-world day-to-day use on systems whose value to our business runs into billions of dollars annually(as in our case; a critical business system).

May I ask if Sparx publish a list of known bugs? and what is the company's formal policy on bug reporting, tracking, fixing and testing?

Thanks
Hugh

10

General Board / Labels on Decision diamonds

« on: October 11, 2006, 11:51:32 am »

I am trying to create an activity diagram.

I want to the label I am using to arrange the two words vertically rather than horizontally. e.g.

"Client Account" should appear as "Client" with "Accoun" centered beneath it, I can do this kind of thing easily in Visio, but no way it seems in EA.

Please tell me how EA does this?

Thx
Hugh

11

General Board / Documentation Granularity

« on: October 12, 2006, 07:54:22 am »

Is there a setting or flag etc that can suppress the generation of the detailed info for each element, when generating documentation?

For example for drafts for user reviews etc it would be very helpful if they did not have to see GUID, Dtes, Author, Flags etc.

For these reviews it is far better to show only the diagrams, the text descriptions (for requirements etc) and other functionally relevant data.

Please let me know of this is possible?

Hugh

12

General Board / GUI Designer - Label

« on: October 12, 2006, 07:23:38 am »

Is there any way to use a label type of control when desiging a GUI dialog?

There are other kinds of controls, but we need a label that is populated at the top of our forms and guides the user about how to use the form.

This label is NOT associated with some specific text box or anything, does EA support this?

Thx

13

General Board / Laying out a flow chart

« on: October 11, 2006, 12:01:43 pm »

I am creating an activity diagram.

I began with an "Initial" symbol at top of page, beneath that a decision diamond and beneath that another decision diamond.

I joined these using the "Control Flow" arrow.

I then tried Layout Diagram and it decided to lay it out upside down, that is it turned my diagram upside down and had the second decision diamond at the top of the page etc.

This is ridiculous, if there is no way to control this sort of of laying out then I am seriously going to be challenegd selling this to a team of busy BSAs.

Hugh

14

General Board / Layout Diagram weak

« on: October 11, 2006, 11:18:49 am »

I added a bunch of requirement elements to a diagram.

I wanted them listed in some sensible way (order ascending by name) vertically down page for example.

Well layout diagram option laid them out horizontally, and it went past the page border too for some reason.

It seems to use some ingenious algorithm that decides to lay out the requirements as

Row 1 -> 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2
Row 2 -> 12, 11, 10, 1

Each requirements is named WAUk1, WAUk2 etc.

I also tried altering the "Set Layout Style" options for the diagram yet despite the many variables and option, it had absolutely no effect on how the diagram was laid out.

I simply cannot understand why it disregards the page width and why I cannot control ordering based upon some lexical rule.

Finally I selected every requirement in my diagram and then used Element..Space Evenly..Down and incredibly it laid every element out DIAGONALLY across page, going from top right to bottom left (and again disregarding page border!!!).

I really do not understand how one can expect to serioulsy use this tool given the great degree to which it refuses to behave intuitively.

Is there any way to increase the capability of layout diagram???

H

15

General Board / Activity Diagrams layout

« on: October 11, 2006, 12:40:10 pm »

This is incredibly bad, I have drafted a simple activity diagram and no matter what I try, when I use "Layout Diagram" it constructs a ridiculous representation.

It seems to insist on creating an inverted tree, rooted in the "initial" element.

All I want is to layout my flowchart on some form of rectangular grid, automatically, this is trivial in some basic flowcharting tools!!!!

Hugh