Messages

1

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: Update Class diagram with XMI import

« on: September 29, 2011, 07:46:54 pm »

Hi Geert,

Thanks for your answer, but the one drawback with the ODBC reverse egineering method is that we've got an OO database, so although we can set up an ODBC connection to it, we lose some of the detail when that OO data structure is represented as a normal relational database. We might get away with this,  but the other problem is also that EA still changes the layout of the diagram as soon as I do an import from the ODBC datasource, so it doesn't keep my original layout in tact. I don't know if there's a setting or something that I'm just missing?

I guess the other option will be to write our own add in, but I just want to make sure that there isn't an easier way to do this before we go that route  

2

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Update Class diagram with XMI import

« on: September 28, 2011, 11:02:29 pm »

Hi,

I'm quite new to EA so I'm not sure if what we want to do is possible, perhaps there is another way to do this.

We are exporting our database classes to an XMI file, and then importing it into EA to create a Class Diagram. This works fine to create a new model from scratch, but the problem is we would want to export the classes after every new release of the system, and then the existing Class Diagram should be updated with the changes when we import it into EA.

The problem is our XMI export doesn't have the xmi.id's as GUIDs, so EA changes the ids during the import. So the next time when we do an import of the latest XMI export, the classes are created as duplicates, because the ids do not match.

Is there a way to do this by using XMI imports, or should we have a look at other ways to do this?

I may just add, there are a lot of classes in the diagram, so we had to do the layout by hand to make neat and tidy, so the main problem is we don't want to have to redo the layout every time after we've done an import, so the classes in the existing layout should just be updated.

Thanks,
Stephan