Messages

1

Suggestions and Requests / Development and Deployment Options for a project

« on: September 05, 2010, 02:13:55 am »

Currently, when you start a project, it asks what modeling components to include. I think it would also make sense to include development and deployment options. For example:

Development:

Language:   Java    PHP    C++
SCC:   CVS   Subversion   MSS
Build:   Ant   Maven

Deployment:

OS:   Windows   Linux
App Server: GlassFish   Tomcat
Database:  Oracle   MySQL

I think by taking in the options and making logical choices (e.g., if Maven is selected, create a POM and directory structure based on Maven) EA could really help with setting up new projects consistently. Does anyone else see any value in this?

2

Suggestions and Requests / Re: DDL to manage a changing schema

« on: July 17, 2006, 01:35:11 pm »

You may want to look at the ERWin tool from CA (Computer Associates) to see how they do it. Their implementation is for databases only and is very robust - but not complete.

There are two areas I am interested in:

- Is every required feature of the database available through ODBC? You may have to limit functionality so that all ODBC connections will work.

- Some changes cannot be made with a simple Alter. This is particularly a problem if the database has data in it. Also referential integrity creates interesting problems. The most general solution is to dump the data, delete the tables and such, create the new tables, and load the data back. But, this may not be efficient.

I am looking forward to this feature.

3

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Build EA inside Eclipse

« on: January 28, 2008, 09:22:29 am »

Good point. I was only looking at it from one point of view. I guess the MDG approach will be the most cost effective way to support multiple IDEs. Even within the Java world, there are many users of NetBeans and other IDEs. Oh well, it seemed like a good idea when I wrote it.

4

Suggestions and Requests / Build EA inside Eclipse

« on: January 27, 2008, 07:35:16 pm »

I am not sure if this is legally doable. What I envision is that EA would be a plugin for Eclipse. It would talk to the EA specified data store for the model. But, it would share the project model with Eclipse. I have the EA MDG but it does not seem to me that it goes this far. The two biggest advantages I see are:

- Sparx would be able to focus on building the model and the UI but the overall interface would be provided by Eclipse. This would allow Sparx resources to focus on their added value. It would also ease the learning curve for Eclipse users.
- I would expect that EA would nativly run on whatever platofrms that Eclipse supports.

I am not sure how the Open Surce nature of Eclipse would impact this. It would be a shame if Open Source was a limiting the adoption of a tool such as EA.

5

Suggestions and Requests / A Modest Proposal

« on: July 13, 2007, 07:25:15 am »

Microsoft talks about "eating their own dog food" when they use their own products. I think Sparx should do the same thing. It would be great if a future version of EA (say 9.0) were completely designed and documented in EA.

It may be that Sparx is actually too small a company to do this. So, a few dedicated users could work with Sparx to do this over a period of time.

I would expect that the first phase of modeling and generation would identify limitations of the current product. These could be used as a major high priority input into version 8.0. Then, the modeling could be completed.

With the modeling completed, version 9.0 could be delivered.

- Does this seem feasible?
- Can anyone commit 4-8 hours a week to work on something like this?
- Would Sparx even be interested?
- Can Sparx set up the infrastructure for such a project?
- I would expect that it would take about 10 dedicated people 6 months to get to the needs for Version 8.0 stage.
- Could the IP and ownership issues be handled?

All in all, I think this would be a great show piece for what EA can do and would greatly improve the product.

Any thoughts?

6

Suggestions and Requests / High Level Transform and Code Generator FS

« on: July 11, 2007, 12:38:16 pm »

It would be nice if we could define a high level picture of how a project is layed out on disk. For example, one strucutre might be:

\project
  \bin
  \src
     \dao
     \service
     \vo
     \web

There are many other possibilities. But if we could define this for a project. Then, we could tag classes - as we define them or during a Transform or both - with the location they belong in. Then, when we generate, the appropriate file location would be used.

7

Suggestions and Requests / Logical Names

« on: October 31, 2006, 02:40:45 pm »

It would be nice if EA supported both Logical and Physical Names for all or most things. For example, if I have a class named 'OrderLineItems', I may want the Logical or Business name to be 'Order Line Items' but the Physical Name to be 'OLN'.

Currently, there is only one name aviable. Since it can be used during generation, I need to keep the one name closer to technical names - no spaces, etc.

Is there any possibility of adding this?

8

Suggestions and Requests / Persistence

« on: June 26, 2005, 08:45:45 am »

As it stands right now, UML and EA provided no mechanism to map Classes to Databases. On any real application, this can represent 40% - 60% of the development effort. There are a lot of tools, libraries, and approaches that I have read about. In particular, there is a persistence framework being developed by the Java community.

My feeling is that EA could capture persistence requirements and simplify the mapping process. Does this make sense? Is there any work being done on this?

Thanks

9

General Board / Re: Turn on AutoNum when transforming to DDL

« on: January 30, 2014, 12:20:39 am »

Thanks, I will give this a try.

10

General Board / Turn on AutoNum when transforming to DDL

« on: May 07, 2012, 12:32:00 pm »

I am creating a domain model using the DDL transformation. I would like it to genrate all the keys with AutoNum turned on. I looked at the template and found the place where I think it should be done. But, I do not know how to specify the AutoNum property and what value to use to set it to true.

Below is the section from the template where I am trying to modify. My guess is I need to add a line like:

AutoNum = true

But, that does not work. Any help would be great.


%if elemType != "Association"%
  PrimaryKey
  {
    Column
    {
      name=%qt%%CONVERT_NAME(className, "Pascal Case","Camel Case")%ID%qt%
      type=%qt%%CONVERT_TYPE(genOptDefaultDatabase,"Integer")%%qt%
    }
  }
%endIf%

11

General Board / Keep Object and Class Diagrams in Sync

« on: March 06, 2012, 06:39:21 am »

Is there any way in EA to keep object and class diagrams in sync? In particular, we need to keep the relationships between the objects in sync. We have created a robust domain model as a class diagram. The business community would like us to show sample data so that they can better understand what the class stand for. So, we are creating object diagrams and filling in some data items for each object. But, we need to add the relationships between the objects. Also, if they change, it does not update. Am I missing something?

12

General Board / Re: File name in RTF Footer

« on: February 14, 2012, 10:27:45 am »

You can try to use this RTF syntax:
{FILENAME  \p}
But I am not confident that EA will generate this correctly.

Getting closer, but still not there. I added the syntax above, but it was treated just like any other text. So, I imported a document that had the file name in the footer. Well, it looked good in that the text was now grey. But, the file name of the imported document came with it. So, it would only show that name. If only I could find the command to turn the syntax above into an RTF field, it would work.

13

General Board / File name in RTF Footer

« on: February 14, 2012, 07:20:27 am »

I have a client that wants us to generate a lot of documents from EA. We have set up RTF templates for each document. One of their needs is to include the path and document name in the footer of each document. I can put the page numbers in, but cannot find a way to put the file name in the foter. Here is what they want the footer to look like:

C:\docs\requirements\use cases\sales use cases.rtf        Page 1 of 7

Does anyone have any idea how I can add this in?

14

General Board / Re: Sample Data to Show the Intent of a Class

« on: February 23, 2012, 02:57:31 am »

That is not quite what I had in mind, but it does work for me. It provides a picture of the data rather than a spreadsheet.

One issue I have noticed. I have a set of classes that have relationships. When I create the object and assign them to those classes (as instance classifieres) the class level relationships do not carry over. Flor a large model, this is a lot of work and will be prone to errors. Forcing them to have the same relationships would be best for me.

15

General Board / Sample Data to Show the Intent of a Class

« on: February 22, 2012, 02:11:25 pm »

We have a model that we are reviewing with users to make sure we got their requirments right. But, they keep wanting to see sample data to really understand what each class represents. Does anybody have a good way to show data associaated with classes? It would be great if we could represent it as a table of some sort.