Messages

1

Bugs and Issues / Re: v15 – Can’t open diagram in new tab from an existing diagram

« on: March 17, 2020, 08:40:29 pm »

Good find, Paolo! I would never have guessed that select then [Enter] would behave differently from double-clicking. Thank you for sharing.

John

2

Bugs and Issues / Re: v15 – Can’t open diagram in new tab from an existing diagram

« on: September 02, 2019, 10:58:14 pm »

One good thing about the new behaviour is that the tab for the linked diagram gets a left-pointing arrow, which when clicked takes you back to the diagram you came from. So when drilling down into a hierarchy of diagrams, (a) you don't get lots of diagram tabs that you then have to close one by one, and (b) you can easily wind back up the heirarchy when you want to. Nevertheless, there are times when I would still like to be able to easily open a linked diagram in a new tab, so I have raised a feature request for this (I suggested either double-click while holding down the Shift key, or a command on the element's context menu. Perhaps if more people raise similar feature requests, Sparx might be persuaded. One can but hope.

John

3

General Board / Re: How to extend the Test Case element using a UML Profile?

« on: January 10, 2018, 03:06:23 am »

Thank you, qwerty - that seems to have done the trick.

4

General Board / How to extend the Test Case element using a UML Profile?

« on: January 09, 2018, 09:53:26 pm »

We have used the 'Test Case' element from the Use Case diagram toolbox to document our test cases. I want to add a tagged value called testType to all current and future Test Case elements and use it to distinguish between manual tests and various kinds of automated tests. I know that a Test Case element is a UseCase element with stereotype = "testcase". I have defined a UML Profile with extensions of other element types, but I'm stuck on extending Test Case because when I drag a Metaclass element onto my profile diagram and select the Stereotypes tab, I cannot find the stereotype "testcase" anywhere in any of the lists. Can anyone tell me how to get round this?

Thanks,

John

5

General Board / Re: Generate document structured according to element relationship tree?

« on: October 12, 2017, 10:56:02 pm »

Thanks for your further input Sunshine and Dermot.

In fact it turns out that I don't need to use scripts within EA at all, as I have now found a relatively simple solution to my problem: RepoDoc, from Archimetes (http://www.archimetes.com). Essentially, with RepoDoc you prepare a template in the liquid template language, using a plain text editor. When I first looked at RepoDoc, it had the liquid feature that supports recursion disabled, but when I explained my problem to Jan at Archimetes, he very quickly produced a development version of RepoDoc  and a template that did what I needed in terms of following links from one model element to another to an arbitrary depth. The template was 70 lines long in total. That development version of RepoDoc has now been formally released. I have found the liquid template language easy to learn, but powerful.

This solution won't necessarily be for everyone, because it doesn't support generating Microsoft Word documents. But with the addition of easily available (and free) post-processing tools, RepoDoc can produce good looking documents in pdf format, which is what I want (because I don't agree with providing customer-facing documentation as Microsoft Word documents.)

Disclaimer: I have no connection with Archimetes other than as a (soon to be) customer. I'm just posting what I have found in case it is useful to others.

Thanks, everyone.

6

General Board / Re: Generate document structured according to element relationship tree?

« on: October 07, 2017, 04:20:49 am »

qwerty, Sunshine, Peter, Uffe and Geert - thank you all for your suggestions.

It looks as though the solution has to involve scripting, because I need to walk a tree of linked elements.

Geert, I will certainly have a good look at your tutorial and example. At first glance it looks as though that approach, but using a script instead of SQL so that I can get the elements recursively, might well be the best.

Thanks again, everyone,

kents

7

General Board / Generate document structured according to element relationship tree?

« on: October 06, 2017, 03:40:01 am »

Hi all,

I need to generate a document that is structured according to the links between elements in my model, not according to the package hierarchy. Is this possible using EA's built in document report generator?

Here is the scenario in more detail. I have an EA model that contains elements of types "feature", "requirements" and "test cases". These are linked to each other in a tree structure: at the root of the tree is a feature; this feature is linked to lower level features, which can in turn be linked to lower level features (and so on to an arbitrary depth); each feature element in the tree may also be linked to zero, one or more "requirement" elements; the leaf feature elements are linked to one or more "requirement" elements; each requirement element is linked to zero, one or more "test case" elements. The elements in this tree are spread over many different packages in the model. I need to generate a test plan document containing information taken from the test case elements, and the section hierarchy in the document must correspond to the feature hierarchy in my model.

If EA's built in document report generator cannot do this, does anyone know of a third party tool that can? Or is it going to be a case of writing my own script to do it?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

8

General Board / Re: Is there a way to colour an element based on the links it has?

« on: October 02, 2017, 11:57:08 pm »

@Uffe, @qwerty - Thank you for your responses. It sounds as though I'll have to wait for Sparx to add a feature that allows auto colouring based on a custom query. I will raise a feature request. If it comes to it, I'll write a script that I can run from time to time to update colours based on my criteria, but clearly that is not as convenient as the colouring being set automatically, as the model is changed.

John

9

General Board / Is there a way to colour an element based on the links it has?

« on: September 30, 2017, 12:31:50 am »

(Sorry if this has been asked before, but I have searched both the user manual and the user forum without success)

I want to show all elements of a particular type everywhere in my model, with one of two background colours, the choice of colour being determined by whether or not the element is connected by one or more realization links from elements of another type.

Does anyone know of a way to do this?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

10

General Board / How to refresh parameter name  on sequence diagram

« on: February 28, 2014, 03:02:49 am »

I have a sequence diagram showing a number of messages going between an actor and an object. The messages have been specified as interface operations, and the two interfaces are realized by the actor and the object respectively. When I created the sequence diagram, I added the message names by selecting from the drop down list on the Message Properties diagram. All well and good so far.

Since creating the sequence diagram, I have changed the names of some of the parameters of some of the operations in the interface definitions. I was expecting that when I reopened the sequence diagram, all of these changes would automatically be reflected on the diagram (I have set "Show Paramter Detail" to "Name Only"). But no, all the parameter names are the old ones (even though I also changed some of the operation names, and those changes are automatically reflected on the diagram).

I have found a way to get the new names reflected on the diagram, but it involves clicking on each message in turn and either clicking the Operations button and then simply clicking OK twice, or selecting the message again from the drop down list.

The problem is that I've got a lot of sequence diagrams and messages and I don't want to have to click on them all manually. So the question is: is there an easier way of refreshing the parameter names for all messages on all diagrams - preferably in one easy step?

I'm using EA version 10, build 1009.

Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestions.

11

General Board / Message notes in HTML report of seq diag

« on: July 18, 2013, 07:34:28 am »

Hi,

I am generating HTML reports for packages containing sequence diagrams. When viewing a sequence diagram in a browser, I would like to be able to click on an individual message and see its details (the contents of its Notes property, at least). Is it possible to modify the css/html template to do this, and if so, how?

I am aware that clicking on a lifeline brings up a page with two tabs listing messages sent to and from the lifeline, with their notes. This is better than not being able to see the notes at all, but on a diagram of any significant complexity it is difficult to correlate the messages on this page with the messages on the sequence diagram.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

12

General Board / Re: Feature versus Requirement in generated RTF do

« on: March 05, 2013, 03:18:28 am »

Yes, that does what I want.

Thank you.

13

General Board / Re: Feature versus Requirement in generated RTF do

« on: March 05, 2013, 03:02:20 am »

Yes, I could do that. But EA clearly already knows which is a Feature and which is a Requirement, so it seems wrong to have to put in that information again.

Thanks for your response anyway.

14

General Board / Feature versus Requirement in generated RTF doc?

« on: March 04, 2013, 09:45:55 pm »

Hi,

I am using EA for requirements management, and have created a model containing Feature elements and Requirement elements (from EA's built-in Requirements toolbox. When I generate an RTF report for this model, there is nothing in the document to indicate which elements are Features and which are Requirements. How can I get the report to distinguish between them? Something like prefixing each Feature with the text 'Feature' and prefixing each Requirement with 'Requirement' would do.

By the way, I know that in diagrams, Features have a blue bar at the left hand side of the rectangle, whereas Requirements have a brown bar. But I am not including the diagrams in my RTF report, because I just want the names and notes text of the Features and Requirements, and some of their attributes.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

15

General Board / Re: How can I reference an element from another to

« on: March 04, 2013, 09:28:21 pm »

Thank you all for your answers.