Custom Properties via MDG?

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Most of us who play with MDG Technologies, know that the "Advanced Properties" for an element or relationship end up as CustomProperties in t_xref.

Is there any way in the MDG specification process whereby one can define a new CustomProperty?

Thomas' excellent book on MDG is, unfortunately, silent on the matter (and the Help doesn't seem to provide any answer either).

TIA,
Paolo

[qwerty]

I'll have a look into that - but no promises

q.

P.S. After some fiddling around I found that it is possible to add new CPs with an INSERT statement. I had to reload EA to show them. Will need a bit more of experimenting.

P.P.S. Brake! After a consistency check the new value has been removed (claimed to be duplicate?!)

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Thanks q,

Don't "bust a gut" getting to the bottom of it.  After a bit of a think, I decided that Custom Properties were too hard to get at... (Decoding all that text) So I opted to go for Tagged Values instead - much easier to work with "under the covers", but not as conceptually nice as custom properties.

BTW: Are Custom Properties visible in Shapescripts?  If not, then another reason for not using them.

Paolo

[qwerty]

To my knowledge only indirectly via an add-in.

q.

[Paolo F Cantoni]

To my knowledge only indirectly via an add-in.

q.

That's what I thought; but if you search the help for the word "triangle", in Query Methods topic, there's an example with what seems like user defined Custom Properties.  RoyC, can you comment?

Paolo

[qwerty]

The only one I found was http://sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/12.1/building_models/writing_scripts.html but I can't spot any custom property reference.

q.

[RoyC]

I found the text that Paolo is referring to. I can't really comment on it other than to say that it does what it says it does. Have a play with it and see if it meets your requirements.

[qwerty]

It would have been nice if you let others participate by posting the link 

q.

[RoyC]

http://sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/12.1/building_models/query_methods.html

The second section of the topic, HasProperty and user-selected settings.

[qwerty]

Ah cool, thanks. This <<diagram property>> thingy, has it been there since a longer time? Never was aware of that.

q.

[KP]

Ah cool, thanks. This <<diagram property>> thingy, has it been there since a longer time? Never was aware of that.

I believe it was added in EA 11.1 specifically to support BPMN. From the release notes:

Diagram specific properties for Gateway marker visibility and Activity expanded added

[Eve]

In addition to KP's comment.

There are a number of profiles that define notational options, and prior to that, the only way a user could set them was via a tagged value. Of course that meant that they couldn't vary the notation on different diagrams.

[qwerty]

Cheers :-) i'll have to look into that.

q.