Messages

1

General Board / Tooboxes Appearance in More Tools

« on: January 20, 2014, 01:53:34 am »

Hi all,

Is it possible to define the order that toolboxes appear? I have a profile with several toolbox pages and it seams that when I press "More Tools", my toolboxes appear in a random way.

Regards,
Luís

2

General Board / Quick Linker and Types of Associations

« on: November 15, 2011, 11:11:24 am »

How to define default associations that appear by default when we create new connectors among elements on a diagram? For example if we try to connect two nodes (deployment diagram) using the “quick linker icon” the options available are:
Association
Usage
Communication Path
-----------------------------
Dependecy
Trace
Information Flow

I would like to represent in a deployment diagram two physical servers connected with a LAN or WAN association (instead of Communication Path). So when we drag the connection (e.g. using quick linker) only WAN or LAN should appear. Any idea?

Note: LAN and WAN are extensions to the metaclass association.

3

Uml Process / UML Profile and Metaclasses

« on: June 01, 2012, 03:11:11 am »

Hi,

I would like to create a UML profile to represent a typical infrastructure with servers, devices and networks (e.g. LAN, WAN, etc...) and connections among them.

My basic questions:

1)
What is the correct way to do it:
Create New Metaclass
In Reference Elements, should I select Node for servers, device for devices and boundary to represent networks and then multiple stereotypes with the extend relationship.

OR INSTEAD  

use the metaclass Class for all these components ?

2)
The same applies to connectors. Should I use the class association or instead communication path, composition etc...  and then multiple stereotypes with the extend relationship.


3) Should we define the multiplicity at the metamodel level?


Thanks in advance and Regards,
Luís

4

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / OCL support in Enterprise Architect

« on: November 18, 2011, 11:33:44 am »

Hi,

Even with all options checked under Project | Project Validation | Configure | Model Validation Configuration it seems that OCL constraints are not correctly validated. For instance the following constraint with an error (sel instead of self) is considered valid:

context Person
  inv  ageinv: sel.age > 17

The same OCL constraint in other tools (e.g. USE) returns the error “Undefined operation named `sel' in expression `Person.sel()”. Can we have an workaround for this?

Not sure if this old blog post ( http://www.empowertec.de/blog/2007/01/15/ocl-support-in-enterprise-architect ) is still valid. In this post the author says:
o      “expressions are applied to the UML metamodel and not to the model itself in the traditional sense.”
o      I could not believe that the OCL support was so much broken and searched the EA forums for OCL. I quickly found a couple of postings that confirmed that the OCL support in EA is indeed as bad as it seemed to me, for example in this post (btw., the original poster of this thread did not realize that OCL is used for the purpose of model validation and not in the usual sense).
o      although the manual says "It is important to note that in order to have a valid OCL constraint EA requires that the syntax be correctly formed, if the expression is not correct EA will inform the user that the OCL constraint is not valid."

Questions:
•      How can we validate models/metamodels?
o      For instance I have the following Classes (Server, Monitor) and I want to validate my model to make sure that a single Monitor is only connected to one Server. Is there a way?
•      Can we use or is there any effort to use/integrate an external OCL engine with EA Sparx?
•      Are examples with constraints (Relationships/Attributes/and model validations) publically available (e.g. Tools, Add-ins, Books, etc.)?


Rgs,
luis