Messages

1

General Board / Re: Info about EA and reverse-engineering aspect!

« on: December 11, 2009, 05:46:24 am »

Thanks for the details. But concerning question 1), using MDG link can I generate diagrams based on Visual Studio project (Instead of files contained in a source directory)? Because the only option that I found and was able to use is generating diagrams from a source directory.

2

General Board / Info about EA and reverse-engineering aspect!

« on: December 10, 2009, 08:27:11 am »

Hi, I send an E_mail to support/costumer service but they didn't respond me, so I decided  to post my questions here :

We are looking for a good reverse-engineering UML to use for code documentation (most of our code is in C/C++ and some parts are C#). I tried the EA trial version and the MDG for Visual Studio. I liked the synchronization functionality between code and diagrams. This is very important for us since all of our documentation and modifications are in the code and we want to keep our documentation (Class diagrams) synchronized with the code. But I have some questions about this functionality and some other general questions:

 1) Is your tool capable of generating diagrams (i.e. class diagrams) based on a VisualStudio (2005 or 2008) project or solution? (the only option I was able to use is generating diagrams based on files contained in a directory)
Let’s say I have a VS solution that contains 3 projects :
      - MySolution:
            o Project1
                   Class1.h
                   Class1.cpp
                   Class2.h
                   Class2.cpp
                   Class3.h
                   Class3.cpp
            o Project2
                   Class4.h
                   Class4.cpp
                   …
            o Project3
                   …

So can I generate a class diagram for each project, and another general class diagram (or package diagram) representing the interaction between all these 3 projects(showing just some important classes I want to put in the diagram)?
Note : Project1, Project2 and Project3 can have different parents directories(so not in the same directory), so I cannot use the reverse-engineering functionality based on a source directory.

 2) Some Remarks/questions about the “synchronize package with code” functionality:
     a) When I did some modifications in the source code and then updated the class diagram using the synchronize functionality, sometimes the diagram was reinitialized and all the classes mixed up again like if the diagram was generated for the first time. Are there any options I should activate to avoid this?
     b) When a class A is modified (in the code) and doesn’t use a class B anymore (class B was a member of the class A), the association relationship in the diagram class between the two classes is not deleted automatically.
     c) Let’s say we have a new class D added in the source directory and is now used by another class C already in the class diagram. If I use the “Code Engineering -> synchronize package with code” functionality this new class B is not automatically added in the class diagram (Only the existing class C is updated by adding the class B member, but class B is not imported to the diagram). The only way I found to add this new class B to the diagram is to reload the source directory using “Code Engineering -> Import Source Directory” this can mix up all the organized class in the diagram.

 3) Concerning the source control : Are there any tool (with the EA software) that can compare diagrams? It would be nice if this tool can show differences between diagrams graphically (i.e. Added methods, modified attributes…).

Thanks