Messages

1

Suggestions and Requests / Filters on Package Explorer

« on: October 25, 2011, 05:12:47 am »

Hello,

I would love to see some element filters be put on the project browser so that as I drill into each package irrelevant content could be hidden from view.

The tricky part is that I would want this to be recursive in nature.

So for example lets say I have the following project browser BEFORE applying any filter.

Package A (Phase 1.0)
     Package B (Phase 1.0)
        Requirement 1 (Phase 1.0)
        Requirement 2 (Phase 1.1)
        Requirement 56 (Phase 6.0)
    Package C (Phase 2.0)
        Requirement 3 (Phase 2.1)
        Requirement 5 (Phase 2.2)

Lets then say I applied an element filter of Phase 6.0 on the project viewer. I would then see this...

Package A (Phase 1.0)
     Package B (Phase 1.0)
        Requirement 56 (Phase 6.0)

The important point here is the packages that have child elements which meet the criteria are shown even if the package doesn't meet the criteria. Also important is how if a package has no elements that meet the criteria, it is hidden.

An alternative to this feature might be an enhancement to the model search that would put the search results in context of the project hierarchy where it was found.

Thoughts on making this happen?

2

Suggestions and Requests / information flow connector enhancements

« on: February 28, 2012, 05:14:12 am »

Hi,

So when establishing information flow between two elements with the information flow connector (stereotype of dependency), I would request the following enhancements in order of importance

1) that there be a section on the connector properties to list/edit the conveyed items instead of having to right click, advanced, show conveyed items

2) have an option in preferences that will hide the conveyed items label by default (becomed unwieldy if more than one item and tedious to right click, label visibility, hide label everytime)

3) enhance the traceability window to show the conveyed items somehow

3

Suggestions and Requests / Misc utilities: file system importer and link copy

« on: February 22, 2012, 06:08:25 am »

Hi all,

Two random ideas for EA tools:

1) File system importer: create a package for a folder on the file system and create elements of the specified class and stereotype for every file encountered. Assume this would be recursive and create subpackages for sub folders and put the elements in the proper place in the hierarchy. Could get fancy and be able to map file types to class and stereotypes. Would also expect a synchronization feature like source code engineering so that could update project contents with file system contents.

Here is the use case for #1: We are trying to model vendor system in EA, that have a lot of special non-standard stuff like files with .PSS / .FPS extensions that are fancy configuration files and vendor specific scrpting languages. Also included are things like .bat files, .exe files, etc. Would like to model these in EA and trace requirements to them but not create them all manually. Could use the .CSV importer but that is a bit tedious and doesn't give us a package structure along with it.

2) Link copy. Pick a source element and a target element and copy all the links the source element has to the target (where valid UML).

Here is the use case for #2: one of my teammates accidently created a component element that represents our one of our subsystems for example sake "trade process" component. He then spent 40 hours linking requirements and other components to it. However, we already had an element for this that we been using since Day 1 with lots of links of its own. Rather than making him manually repoint all his links at the already existing component, a bulk copy would have been useful.

4

Suggestions and Requests / Re: custom stereotype apperance from Image Library

« on: February 22, 2012, 05:51:17 am »

Nevermind, I figured it out. Here is one way to do it. May be a better way!


shape main
{
      
      
      addsubshape("myimage",100,100);
      addsubshape("myshape",100,100);
      
      shape myshape {
            println("#NAME#");
      }
      
      shape myimage {
            image("Server-Database",0,0,100,100);
      }
}

5

Suggestions and Requests / Re: custom stereotype apperance from Image Library

« on: February 22, 2012, 01:23:12 am »

Hey when doing this approach I lose the label? How do I get it back?

6

Suggestions and Requests / Re: custom stereotype apperance from Image Library

« on: February 20, 2012, 12:34:39 pm »

Yup that worked. You might want to add that to the image library help page on the website because others may be wondering the same thing.

7

Suggestions and Requests / custom stereotype apperance from Image Library

« on: February 20, 2012, 01:36:06 am »

So I see that Sparx offers you the ability to import an image library, which I did and all the images look great. Have used the method given in the link to customize element apperance in certian diagrams and that works fine.
http://www.sparxsystems.com/resources/image_library.html

I also see I can override the default appearance of an element basd on stereotype, which is what I want to do for my users migrating from visio to EA so they dont have to go changing the default appearance all the time. Seems you can select a metafile from the file system and/or define a shape script to associate it with a stereotype.

http://www.sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/modeling_languages/creatingcustomstereotypes.html

HOWEVER, it would be nice to assign a sterotype a default appearance USING METAFILE IMAGES from THE IMAGE LIBRARY!

Seems like a pretty big feature gap to me!

8

General Board / managing UML stereotypes

« on: February 29, 2012, 04:46:42 am »

Hi,

So looks like a Stereotype overload since EA will accept any stereotype being input into the dropdown that its now hard to know which ones are the "right ones" i.e. the ones we have defined UML profiles for and/or intend to standardize on.

Any way to...
a) tell which stereotypes have been manually created
b) reload the out of the box EA set
c) lock it down so that new stereotypes cannot be created on the fly by inputting whatever into the stereotype box?

9

General Board / Re: collaboration & multiple feature relase

« on: February 02, 2012, 08:00:22 am »

I did some googling and saw a good third party doc generator that will give me my structured documents much easier than the native document generator from the looks of it called eaDocX. I'll download the trial and report back on how it goes.

One promision option with this tool is to print based on relationships. So perhaps I could create a project element and link requirements to the project and then code to the requirements. I'll let everyone know how that goes too.

Thanks for the input on the doc gen side. I'll also let everyone know how sick of baseline merge I am after a few weeks of my process  :-/

-skip

10

General Board / Re: collaboration & multiple feature relase

« on: February 01, 2012, 06:15:51 am »

I've tried the baseline merge and I agree its quirky. So I've dropped the idea of one EA instance per environment and one EA instance per project and will instead will keep on EA instance per project and a PROD instance that everybody takes a copy with in each project.

Here is why I came to this conclusion:

My goal: use EA for use case/business workflow/functional requirements to component/source code traceability.

What I find limiting in EA that makes me want to do this EA DB per project and environment is document generation.

I need to filter out all changes made between multiple projects i.e. project X only gets printed stuff related to project X. I know I could make people tag any elements for their project and/or alter the phase or version numbers and filter on that but its a LOT of work to ask somebody to do that.

I could separate things for a given project i.e. package per product and have people recreate new elements for each project into their own packages but that doesn't really work for source code as each project would need to keep their own source branch in EA.

With one EA instance per project, I can simply apply the modified date as a document generator element and diagram filter so anything you changed will get included in your document export in true push button fashion.

Also, another gripe I have with document generation in particluar a lot of my design documents look like this:

Heading 2: Changed Components

For each component (element)...

Heading 3: Element name i.e. Class 1
Heading 4: Diagram (s)
Heading 4: Traceability (printing related elements from another elements i.e. connector > source > element)

For the life of me I cannot get the document generator to apply filters on the elements on the ends of the connection to be any criteria at all. So for my logical components/source, if I want to show requirements traceability to only those created and defined in a project I get requirements from all projects, including those from past projects.

11

General Board / Re: collaboration & multiple feature relase

« on: January 29, 2012, 03:01:26 am »

Hi,

I had this exact same question. Here is what I plan to do about it when we implement EA this year. Any feedback is welcome:

Created a core folder structure and a gold copy of our master specifications as part of a KT program from contractors to full time staff.

Deploy EA in a shared DB mode and PROD copy is locked down except for a few administrators. New projects then get their own copy of the DB to work on.

We also establish a copy of the EA DB for each of our physical environments i.e. TEST, QA and the flow works like this:

1) Project X Copy (aka DEV) takes a baseline
2) In TEST region, we look to merge the changes from their baseline into our TEST region for. The project's teachnical lead takes this responsibility and makes sure as he is doing the merge that all the differences make sense based on the scope. This occurs the same time the code moves to the TEST instance of our application from a deployment perspective and repeats as code is repromoted
3) When its time for the next project to go into TEST, the do the same and get the chance to see how their changes clash with another project
4) process repeats for QA region...
5) process repeats for PROD region except the EA administrator does that merge because that instance is locked down to prevent unscantioned changes

The only issue we have this process is during some testing we seem to get out of memory errors sometime when taking a baseline. Our source code is big (as we keep multiple apps in the same EA project since they integrate with each other) so our project has a ton of elements in it.

While I have no explaination for this from EA, my guess is because when you take a baseline it seems like it has to hold the entire XML in memory before it writes it to the output file so it will throw out of memory error/crash with too big of a package structure being baselined.

Please let me know if anybody else has had this problem and/or tried to use EA in this way.

Regards.

12

General Board / Synch Imported Elements from DB Schema

« on: January 28, 2012, 03:40:58 am »

Hi all,

So I'm new to EA and have imported tables/procedures/etc from my software's Oracle DB into EA a month ago. Since then, I've done some work linking tables to requirements and other such things. Now I want to refresh my previous DB import but am unsure how to do so WITHOUT losing all the notes/links I've attached so far. I'd just try this but am too afraid to do so  without some insight from someone who knows better? :-/

Also, what happens if I import the same schema from a different physical DB instance? For example, my schema name is Foo and there are three copies of it: one for TEST on TEST.WORLD, QA.WORLD, and PROD.WORLD.

If I imported first from Foo @ PROD.WORLD but wanted to refresh EA from Foo @ TEST.WORLD would it recognize the tables etc as being the same and synch or would it create new?

Thanks!

13

General Board / Multple levels of child elements as nested bullets

« on: November 02, 2011, 06:30:02 am »

Hi all,

Trying to get EA to print requirements that are captured as child elements three or four levels deep as a bullet point list where the bullet list level matches the child entity level.

So the following element structure would yield a bullet point list when printed that looks like it

Requirement 1
   Requirement 1.1
     Requirement 1.1.1
       Requirement 1.1.1.1

Anybody know how to do this?

14

General Board / display fully qualified class name

« on: September 19, 2011, 11:51:51 pm »

Hello all,

I'm putting classes from different packages together in the same class diagram to show how they trace to requirements and I'd like to display the fully qualified class name on the class element.

For example for the class Calculator, I'd like to see it displayed like this:

com.company.business.calculator.Calculator

Can't seem to find a way to do it. Any help?

15

Bugs and Issues / Oracle Package Body Import Max Length?

« on: October 01, 2011, 11:10:44 pm »

Hi all,

So I'm trying to import an oracle package. The specification shows up but the package body doesn't after import. Is  there a max length for the body in the import process and can this be solved by a copy and paste instead?

If this is a max length issue, what is driving that and is that a bug that can be fixed?

Thanks!