Messages

1

General Board / Re: MySQL - problems

« on: December 09, 2002, 03:09:42 pm »

Hi Dave,

With my MySQL installation (4.0.4 on SuSE 8.0) I too found that I couldn't create a new DB from the EA end.  This may be because the ODBC connection is to a specific database at the server end.  If there's not one there then what do you connect to to create a new one??

One neat solution is to use Webmin to administer your server (if you don't have it then download from www.webmin.com)  You can then log on to the server from your Windows PC with the appropriate user id and create a new DB and run the scripts to create the tables.  Then copy your .EAP projects into it.  

This way also has the advantage that the MySQL user id you let the EA users have need not have all the full table create/drop permissions - you can reserve that to another MySQL user which you use for administration of the database.

Good luck

James

2

General Board / Re: problem with export to XML

« on: December 04, 2002, 08:56:40 am »

Three follow-up points:

1.  For Jumbik in the initial post - I've found that if you remove the second line (<!DOCTYPE....) then it will display OK in IE5.5  Don't know why...

2.  I've discovered that if you use single or double quotes in any of your text (for example in a Use Case about a customer's products) the XMI parser gets confused.  Anyone have any ideas about how these can be escaped?  I've tried replacing with /' but to no avail.

3.  Looking at an export from Togethersoft (which did go into EA OK) their second line is: <XMI xmi.version = '1.1' xmlns:UML = '//org.omg/UML/1.3'> - I've bolded the bit that's different.   And there's no <!DOCTYPE... line

Thanks

james

3

General Board / Re: problem with export to XML

« on: December 03, 2002, 08:21:16 am »

Has anyone had success/otherwise when importing/exporting to Togethersoft?

One of our partners uses it and while we can read their exports they can't read ours.

Takes two to tango...

Many thanks

James

4

General Board / Re: Can classes default to other language?

« on: December 03, 2002, 06:41:09 am »

I'd second the request to be able to set default language for elements to other than the predefined set.   When doing the initial high-level design we quite often don't know the language to be used yet and having one on the documentation can be misleading.

Perhaps <Unspec>, <N/A> or something equally vanilla could be a default option.

James

5

General Board / Re: Importing an external image in a diagram?

« on: December 02, 2002, 02:24:23 am »

Hi Gilles,

Yes, it is possible: look in the helpfile under 'bitmap images in diagrams' and it's explained nice and clearly.

You can also customise reports by going into the Resources workspace and tweaking the Templates for html or rtf - for example including company colour schemes or headers/footers.

However I've so far failed to usefully include custom diagrams such as logos in the html documentation as the path to the /images/ directory has to be specified as an absolute path which then breaks if you move the directory containing the reports (the html pages are all placed in different directories for the output so you can't use relative references).  Perhaps a feature for next time to specify a root /images/ or /include/ directory for html documentation which would automagically create the appropriate relative reference to that directory?

James

6

General Board / Re: Default Initial Position of New Objects

« on: November 28, 2002, 02:20:03 pm »

Gilles,

There's also one trick/irritation that Frank didn't mention and you may not have found yet - putting boundaries on a diagram.  Boundaries don't drag onto the diagram so when clicking the button you get one on the top left of the drawing which you rightly state is less than useful (and it also captures any element inside the boundary so that when you drag it to the right place it takes the element(s) with it).

There is the option to right-click in a blank part of the drawing and the menu includes "add element at cursor" - use this to place a boundary where you need it.

James

7

General Board / Re: MySQL errors when generating documents

« on: November 27, 2002, 05:38:37 am »

I think this must have been fixed in one of the recent releases as I installed build 583 and it works OK now (but the diagram redraw is still slowing things down a lot)

8

General Board / Re: MySQL errors when generating documents

« on: November 26, 2002, 01:36:56 pm »

I've also experienced this (I'm using build 577, with MySQL on Linux).  When I duplicated the t_connector table as another table called t_Connector the problem magically disappears - looks like a typo in the client end.

I'd also agree with the slowness caused by re-drawing each diagram.

PS installing the MySQL backend was an absolute doddle - much easier than the MS SQL Svr that I did last week.

9

General Board / Re: incorrect created date

« on: November 15, 2002, 05:05:26 am »

And if you don't have MS Access, you can do it in Excel (get external data via MS Query, connect to the Access database through ODBC driver and just update the tables direct).

NB - this direct access to the tables is very dangerous and a good way to destroy your database unless you know exactlywhat you are doing! (which of course as software engineers we all do....)

10

General Board / Hidden relationships

« on: November 15, 2002, 04:14:36 am »

I'm using Corporate trial version, release 577.

We have build a number of system views on Component diagrams (dragging & dropping h/w and s/w items from Deployment packages)

To reduce clutter on the diagrams I use the diagram level "set visible relations" feature to turn off a number of the relationships.  However, whenever I then drag another Node onto the diagram the last lot of 'hiding' of relationships that I did reverts and they show again.  Only by pressing 'save' after each lot of hiding can I prevent this happening.  

Is this intentional?  If it is, then this might be a useful tip to others....

11

General Board / Re: database scripts

« on: November 13, 2002, 05:29:47 am »

I'm assembling a trial of the Corporate Edition (we already use Professional) and had some trouble creating the initial database.  When running the script I had errors relating to the "COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS" statement in the Create Table commands.  When I removed it the script ran OK (there were still some reported errors about "incorrect use of ON in line 8" but the app runs fine now.

Is there a specific version of MS Sql Svr that you need?  I'm using MSDE 7.00.623 which should be equivalent to the 'normal' Sql Svr 7.0

What do these COLLATE commands do anyway and is omitting them important? - the SQL manual doesn't refer to them as a valid command

12

General Board / Re: UML 1.4

« on: February 22, 2002, 05:23:07 am »

Not wishing to jump in for the sake of it, it seems to me that we are to a large extent violently agreeing.  

Let's not forget that, not so long ago, everyone thought that 1.3 was the biz and berated those still using 1.2!

As the software industry becomes more mature and adopts 'traditional' engineering principles our standards will continue to evolve.

I think that Geoff and his team have got it right - adopt those bits of new standards as soon as possible where practical, and the remainder in due course.  Better than sticking with 1.3 until 1.4 compliance arrives all in one go at some point in the future.

There is however another issue, whereby the rapid pace of change within EA makes it hard for large teams to be sure that they are all working on the same version.  That subject may well be worth starting a separate discussion thread for.......

13

General Board / Re: [Q] Clipboard appears to be broken

« on: February 28, 2002, 09:00:06 am »

Hi Julian,

What you're using is the 'internal' clipboard, used to move/copy objects within EA.  You will find that, if you copy some objects to the clipboard as described, you can go to another diagram and, when right-clicking the mouse on the diagram you have two new options to 'Paste objects as link' and 'Paste Objects as new'.  These allow you to place objects on more than one diagram (as link) or complete copies (as new).  I think this is fairly well covered in the help-files.

If you want to copy a diagram out of EA and into MS-world then use 'Copy diagram image to clipboard' or 'Copy...to file'.  You might want to experiment with these two and also the 'Tools->Options' setting of 'clipboard to bitmap/metafile' for best results when copying into Word/Powepoint/Visio etc (some options don't render backgrounds of semi-transparent objects too well).

I'd also commend Steve Straley's excellent manual which explains this well on pp70-75 (look on the Sparx Systems main site for links to download it).

James

14

General Board / Association links

« on: January 23, 2002, 09:38:42 am »

In an object/class diagram, the 'plain' association link now appears with a direction arrow.  It should start with no arrow - during early stages of design when putting together a domain model such directional information simply doesn't exist.  

The user manual still shows it as a non-directional plain link - is this a bug?

I've just upgraded to 3.10 build 450 and I'm sure that in previous builds the link had no arrows.

15

General Board / Re: Associations and name adornment

« on: February 20, 2002, 03:33:47 am »

If I understand you correctly, it's straightforward.  Just double-click on the association link, and you can give it a 'Link Name' which will show up on the diagram next to the line.  If you need to add more, then put it in the 'Notes' field - this will come out in the text documentation.

James