Messages

1

Suggestions and Requests / Improve text format options in notes field

« on: November 06, 2012, 02:59:43 am »

Hi

I have been taking a closer look at the document generation functionality, both from EA and eaDocX, as I would like to move more information into the EA model. There are a couple of things that reduce the quality of the documentation that can be generated from the models:

• Although bullet points and numbering is offered in the notes fields, it would be a huge improvement to allow nesting of bullet points and numbered items. This would allow the generation of documents that don't look so much like a collection of diagrams and descriptions, but more like a cohesive document.
• Including cross reference links in addition to the hyperlinks in the notes fields, i.e. links that contain the name of the item they link to rather than having to provide static text. This would allow you to link to an item without the overhead of maintaining the text in the link should the name of the diagram change. It also makes it easier to read in printed form.

Thanks

Mike

2

General Board / Defining source and target for relationship matrix

« on: November 07, 2012, 01:46:56 am »

Hi

I have created a model to describe some customer and product requirements, with views within the model root node as follows:

• Customer A's requirements
• Customer B's requirements
• Product requirements

All customer requirements are described using requirement elements, but product requirements are described using both requirement and usecase elements. I have defined realize relationships between product and customer requirements and would like to create a relationship matrix for each set of customer requirements to show the relationship between customer and product requirements.

The problem that I have is that I can't find a way of defining the relationship matrix so that, for example, Customer A's requirements are the source and the Product requirements (requirement and usecase elements) are the target that gives me the result I need. Choosing a package to define the source and target includes elements that I don't need, e.g. actors and packages, and using a search (which can restrict the results to requirement and usecase elements) doesn't seem to allow a starting point in the model hierarchy to be defined, so I get both customer and product elements returned by the search.

Is there a way to do this?

Thanks

3

General Board / Re: Problems reverse engineering MSSQL DB

« on: October 15, 2010, 08:03:07 pm »

SQL version:

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - 8.00.760 (Intel X86)
Dec 17 2002 14:22:05
Copyright (c) 1988-2003 Microsoft Corporation
Standard Edition on Windows NT 5.0 (Build 2195: Service Pack 4)


Driver version:

Microsoft SQL Server ODBC Driver Version 06.01.7600

4

General Board / Problems reverse engineering MSSQL DB

« on: October 13, 2010, 09:57:03 pm »

Hi,

I'm attempting to generate a DB schema by reverse engineering an existing MSSQL DB.

However, when I attempt to import the tables from the DSN I have created I get an "Error retrieving table details" message and the following error is reported in the output window:

Error retrieving columns for table: syscolumns => [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Line 47: Incorrect syntax near 'p'.      

Has anyone come across this error before?

Thanks

5

General Board / Re: How can I hide objects within a package?

« on: October 08, 2010, 01:46:59 am »

Thanks for your reply.

From what you say and further investigation I think the only way to deal with this problem is to manage it with packages as you suggest.

6

General Board / How can I hide objects within a package?

« on: October 02, 2010, 12:04:06 am »

Hi,

I have created a package diagram to show the relationships between packages and the contents of each package in terms of interfaces and classes.

However, when I add a package to the diagram it displays the entire contents of the package which includes diagrams, frames and objects. How do I prevent this noise and just display the useful elements, i.e. interfaces and classes?

Also, is it possible to hide objects in the browser view, i.e. the class instances from diagrams within a package?

Thanks

7

General Board / Object automatically destructed in sequence diag

« on: October 08, 2010, 01:43:47 am »

Hi,

I've created a sequence diagram in which an object is created and then used. That object is retained by its parent for future use, however, once I add in an operation call on the child object EA shows the object's lifetime terminating when the parent's operation completes.

I have tracked this behaviour down to the Tools | Options | Diagrams | Sequence Diagrams | Activation Indicator | Garbage Collect (auto delete) option. I can see that by disabling this option I can control the delete behaviour.

However, if this option is enabled is there any way to show that a reference to an object is kept, therefore preventing the automatic deletion of objects? I don't see how this option is at all helpful unless such an option exists.

Thanks

8

General Board / Creating objects in communication diagrams

« on: March 12, 2010, 06:49:53 am »

Hi,

I can't work out how to show the creation of an object on a communication diagram. This is something I have done using less formal modelling tools but when I try and add a message that has the Lifecycle property set to New I get a validation error that prevents me from saving it.

It does kind of make sense that you can't send a message to create an object if it already exists, but it's possible to show the creation of objects on sequence diagrams so I expected that it would be possible on communication diagrams too.

Is this possible or am I trying to do something that just isn't allowed in UML 2?

Thanks

9

General Board / Communication diagram numbering of interactions

« on: February 15, 2010, 11:10:57 pm »

Hi,

The help page entitled Communication Diagrams appears to contradict itself. I'm interested in knowing which is the correct approach to numbering.

The help page says that the numbering is important to indicate the order and nesting of processing and gives examples of numbering as 1, 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.2 etc.

However, in the example diagram shown the numbering is 1, 1.1, 1.2 even though these interactions span 3 objects. I would expect the numbering to be 1, 1.1, 1.1.1. I know that some people prefer not to use the 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 number convention and instead use 1,2,3 etc but the example in the help appears to fall in between the two styles.

Thanks

10

General Board / Re: How to set attribute values on object diagrams

« on: January 04, 2010, 11:59:55 pm »

Thanks for that. Not sure how I managed to miss that, I think I must have tried every option except that one!

11

General Board / How to set attribute values on object diagrams?

« on: January 04, 2010, 11:19:33 pm »

Hi,

I am trying to create an Object Diagram to describe the relationships between a set of objects and the state of each object for a particular scenario. However I can't see how to set the attribute values for the objects. The Properties page doesn't display the object's class attributes, and the Attributes page simply displays the class's attributes. Is it possible to do this?

Thanks

12

General Board / Re: Reverting model back to a previous revision

« on: December 01, 2009, 04:25:39 am »

Good spot, I think I got myself a bit muddled there.  

Thanks.

13

General Board / Reverting model back to a previous revision

« on: December 01, 2009, 01:47:48 am »

Hi,

I have just setup a team working environment for EA following the Shared Model configuration described in the Setting up Version Control White Paper. We are using subversion for our version control and MSSQL for our shared EA repository and this seems to be working ok.

However, I can't see how we would go about reverting a model to a previous revision should the need arise. Clearly we would have the model information available to us in our svn repository but I'm not sure how we get that into our EA repository.

Is it possible to do this from within EA or would we need to do something like:

• Revert to the required revision using a version control client, tortoise svn in our case
• Import model details for all affected packages from the local xml files
• Checkout the affected packages in EA
• Check them back in again in EA

I have tried this and it seems to work although when I diff the xml files in svn I see (when comparing the latest with the revision that was reverted to) lots of differences when I might have expected to see none. Is this just a side effect of how the XMI files are generated?

Thanks.

14

General Board / Re: How to create a constraint across relationship

« on: October 01, 2009, 07:30:43 pm »

That's great, thanks for such a prompt reply  

15

General Board / How to create a constraint across relationships

« on: October 01, 2009, 01:30:17 am »

Hi,

I have recently started using EA and I'm having problems trying to create a constraint that applies across 2 relationships on a class diagram.

Eg.

If I wanted to show a Parent class with 2 assocations with a Child class where 1 association had a role of Current and the other had a role of All, I would like to be able to show the constraint that Current was a subset of All.

Hope that makes sense. I haven't been able to find anything in the help that shows how to do this. I have found one page of the online help that shows such a constraint, the subject in the Index is "Relationship, Window, Context Menu", but it doesn't show how to create it.

Thanks

NexDev