template editor should be fixed

[marcelloh]

I suggest the following should work:
1. make new template
2. copy from use case scenario report (standard document)
3. click on section "Constraint" (in left sections-tree)
4. click on hand-up-icon (in top section-tree)
5. click on hand-down-icon (in top section-tree)

and that the template is just like it was, instead of ruined  

PS. Make this a test case....
(and btw: fire the tester...., and hire a good one)

Sorry, but I get really pissed of by such childish behaviour of what supposed to be a mature tool.

I'm not in the mood (so pardon my French). I'm having so much trouble and iritation with the reporting engine of EA, for more than a year now. It has to improve. I now have a ruined template that I have worked on for more then just "a couple of hours". And I can do this all over again.  If you Sparxians think the generated documentation is not that important, then think like this is java code, generated by EA which won't compile. It is totally unacceptable. And I want this to be the best product in the world, so I would like to help to improve it, by giving my valuable information as customer.

[Eve]

Hello marcelloh,

I won't respond to each of your posts, but I want to thank you for taking the time to let us know your experiences with RTF reporting in EA.  I offer my personal apologies for the issues that you have come across.  We do understand the importance of generated documentation and see the report generators as a major feature.

You will be happy to know that we have put a considerable amount of work in the RTF reporting and template editor for version 8.0.  This includes improvements to robustness and flexibility.

We trust that this will more than address your concerns.

We are also happy to say that a beta version of 8.0 is not far away.  We would love to receive your comments on the changes that have been made during the beta period.

[marcelloh]

I would love to testdrive this, I really do.

I have good faith that you guys will pull this off.
I know I'm complaining for more than a year now, but I still know, we both will come out stronger  

So keep me posted

[Geert Bellekens]

We are also happy to say that a beta version of 8.0 is not far away.

Christmas present?  

Geert

[fwoolz]

Maybe Epiphany present?  

Sparx has always had the shortest update cycle of any commercial tool (or open source tool, for that matter) I have encountered. That's good. They have also been very quick in implementing new features related both to UML and integration with other tools. That's also good in theory, but in practice has been a mixed blessing.

EA's growth has been organic, and that means that new features sometimes grow on top of old ones that never quite worked correctly in the first place. Several of us in this forum have expressed concern that the EA code base is sorely in need of bottom-up refactoring (starting with the database schema, which has been hacked worse than Janet Leigh in "Psycho"). Maybe 8.0 is a good place to start?

Cheers,
Fred W

[marcelloh]

I once offered to go through their use cases of the template editor, just the help them get things better.

I also give them the hint, to not re-invent this wheel, cause there are more rtf editors around.

I hacked around a piece of PHP code now, that has the XMI-export as a source and can be more flexible for generation as the EA counterpart. I generate HTML but save it with .doc extension, then open MsWord and Voila. If I can do this, they can too. And since the sparxians are much brighter, they will come up with something enormously usefull. I have faith.