Messages

1

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / EA and ChatGPT 5 - the death of the forum?

« on: October 07, 2025, 09:30:56 pm »

This forum has saved me on many occasions, and is beyond question the definitive source of wisdom about the use of EA.
But it's days as the interface into that wisdom may be ending.
Over the last few months I have been using ChatGPT5 to answer my questions about the depths of EA.
And the results are outstanding. (this may apply to other LLMs - I haven't tried any others).
The answers it has given me are at least on the same level as 'Inside EA', may be even more detailed. Almost Geert-level brilliance.
OpenAi have clearly scanned all of the posts in this forum, to the extent that it will even, occasionally, say WHO provided an answer, which is the proof of the source.
Scanning material like this may not be a Good Thing from an Intellectual Property point of view, but it's definitely a thing, and it seems sensible to use it.
Which is where the issue lies: if we all use an LLM to find out about EA, then where does that leave this forum? Why ask the forum, when ChatGPT has all the answers? Where does it leave ALL forums? Does OpenAI just continue to absorb all our collective knowledge, then charge us to use it?
I'm not suggesting an answer here, just pointing out what the future might look like.
I look forward to hearing other people's experiences of LLMs and EA.

2

General Board / Audit information for US M-21-31

« on: March 14, 2024, 10:53:32 pm »

I've just been asked about the exporting of EA Audit information, to support some new US regulation "M-21-31".
It looks like a very far-reaching requirement, to export information about everything that every user edits and views in an EA model.
I have never been asked for anything like this before, but I expect that, if it's a new US regulation, then other parts of the Federal government might ask for it in future.
@Sparx USA: might be an opportinity here for you to create a useful offering?
Hopefully the lack of this function will not stop the US government from using EA.

3

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: Decode BinContent in t_document

« on: February 28, 2024, 08:12:08 pm »

Pure genius Johann.

I would like to award the 2024 'Sparx Sherlock Holmes Award for Best EA Detective' to Johan!!


Thanks to Geert for seeing the element.getTXNote(...) and  element.setTXNote(..) methods.
I'm not sure which release these appeared in, but they do everything I need.
Nearly everything: the value of the languae code which these methods needs can be found in usys_system in the TranslateSecondary setting.

But Johan is still a genius.

4

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: Decode BinContent in t_document

« on: February 22, 2024, 02:32:09 am »

If anyone needs a test case, the data from EA was:
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which was extracted using a simple bit of SQL to read the BinContent column of t_document.
The text should decode to something like:

Dit zijn enkele aantekeningen in het Nederlands, de secundaire taal van EA. Het vertalen gebeurt nog steeds handmatig.
(Apologies to native Dutch speakers: this is aGoogle translation.)

5

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: Decode BinContent in t_document

« on: February 22, 2024, 02:25:45 am »

I have tried to make this work, but when I try to open the ZipArchiveEntry for the str.dat file, I get an error: "A local file header is corrupt".
This may sugest that Sparx have done something else on top of the (ZIP + base64 encoding) which now seems to be normal for potentially large data fields like this.

The data I  am trying to extract is a simple test case:  the translation data for a single element, where I added the translation to the 'notes' translation tab via the UI.

Has anyone else had success in extracting this data?
@Sparx - are there any instructions anywhere which say how to acess this data? Maybe an API call?

6

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: Bellekens EA Excel import-export to create tagged values

« on: December 15, 2023, 09:30:22 pm »

Interest: I'm the author of this tool.

The eaSheets bit of eaTeamWorks can do this - import the element, and relationships of the element. See the eaTeamWorks website.

7

PCS General Board / Re: PCS performance

« on: November 10, 2023, 08:23:56 pm »

Thanks to everyone.
I'll try to get access direct to the DB, and see what difference that makes. I don't know how close PCS and the repository are, so I'll check that as well.

I had an expectation that this would be slower, just not this slow.
I think I may have to go to the 'SQL Only' solution, and optimise repository access a lot more, but I hate doing stuff like this. I makes the code more messy, and introduces loads of errors. But in this configuration, I guess it's the only solution.
There is scope here for a Sparx 'super API' which could do stuff like 'fetch me all the elements in the package'. I already have these kinds of calls for Model Expert, as I was expecting it to be very heavy on repository access, so it doesn't sufer from these issues as much.
But to use SQL everywhere and not the API is a big coding overhead.
Sigh.

8

PCS General Board / PCS performance

« on: November 09, 2023, 08:32:38 pm »

I'm using PCS to access a remote database for the first time, using a very fast connection (1Gb up, 80Mb down, very low-latency (5ms)) and I'm surprised by the performance.
All these numbers relate to using the EA API, not the EA user interface, which seems to perform fine - not as fast as a local QEAX file, but perfectly usable.
The difference when using the API - for read-only operations - between local QEAX and PCS/remote database performance seems to be a factor of 30-40. So an operation (just fetching the current package, then fetching each element from it in turn) is 200ms on a local repository, but around 4 sec using a cloud repository.
Note this just using the API directly: none of my code is being used.

Is this the expected result? Or am I just using a connection or a repository which needs some tuning? If so, what tuning should I do?
Thanks

9

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: Improve performance of EA.Attribute.update

« on: September 13, 2023, 10:43:58 pm »

Really? Not even once, when you really needed to make it go fast?
Thanks anyway

10

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Improve performance of EA.Attribute.update

« on: September 13, 2023, 01:44:33 am »

I have an application which needs to create a lot of new EA classes, each with some class attributes.
I have done all the performance tricks I can think of, including Repository.EnableUIUpdate=false, but the slow part of the process still seems to be the update to each attribute, after it is created: EA.Attribute.update.
Does anyone have any ideas for making this faster?
For scale, I have about 100 classes to create, and about 5-10 attributes for each one, so i'm cool that 500-1000 attributes will take a while, but if there is any way to make it faster, that would be great.

11

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: Where does this dialog come from ? XMI export

« on: August 09, 2023, 07:03:06 pm »

Interesting idea. This looks to apply when new elements are being created - my user is just exporting some data from a package using the EA API.
But thanks for the thought.

12

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: Where does this dialog come from ? XMI export

« on: August 07, 2023, 07:24:56 pm »

I have just had another customer report exactly the same error.
I also raised a bug report 2 years ago for this, but only got the normal reply from Sparx support.
Current customer is using EA 16.1, 64 bit, so I guess it has not been fixed.

@Sparx - please can you look at this again? Customer can't use this API call without this strange dialog appearing.
Thanks

13

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: EA V16 EAPX vs QEAX performance

« on: May 23, 2023, 03:40:31 am »

I thinks we may be comparing apples with...beer.
I was doing lots of simple operations through the API, not doing big data transfers.

14

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / EA V16 EAPX vs QEAX performance

« on: May 20, 2023, 12:28:08 am »

This is not a question - just an observation.
I've been testing some addins, using a variety of old repositories as test data.
And got confused about the results.
After a frustrating day, I finally found out that there is a big, and I mean BIG, HUGE, difference in the performance of EA 16 with QEAX vs the old EAPX format.
A factor of 20 - 50x !!
So if you are wondering why EA 16 is going slow with your old EAP files, just migrate them, and get an instant benefit.
Note that this is for Addins which use the API, so you ight not see the same effect using the UI.

15

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: Finding the visibility of an Addin Window

« on: May 16, 2023, 08:22:58 pm »

So using my new best friend - ChatGPT - after a few iterations of 'no that didn't work, try something else', it came up with :

    Private Declare Function IsWindowVisible Lib "user32.dll" (ByVal hWnd As IntPtr) As Boolean

    Friend Function hasBeenClosedByEA() As Boolean
        Return Not IsWindowVisible(Me.Handle)

    End Function
So if I look into the cloudy depths of Windows, this 'IsWindowVisible' returns the true visibility status of the window.
@Sparx  please can we have a new API call to do this in a more friendly way?