Hi Simon,
Thank you for your response.
I understand your point, but this kind of limitation should be clear in the functionality description. In your website it says that the tool support Generic XSD, which gives the impression that non-standard based models are also a priority. I'm probably not the only one to expect that product enhancements would carry on with the same behaviour.
For a long time I had clients giving up from modelling canonical models in EA and using other tools (i.e. Altova XML Spy or Visual Paradigm), which has been a real pain for me and my colleagues as we try to use Sparx EA as the only modelling tool for Enterprise Information Modelling and respective derivation of XSDs for Integration services. This give us more control over change due the benefit of traceability.
I know that you've mentioned we can use scripts and add-ins, but this is not usually welcomed from my clients' perspective as they prefer 'out-of-the-box' functionalities to avoid problems with support and upgrades.
Regarding your point about what would be the right tool for the job, I was expecting it to be the Schema Composer. This is because its main functionality, create model subset, is something that we are doing by using the 'Create Subset' functionality from Altova XML Spy, and it does the job well (but it is not great to use 2 different tools to do this job).
If you are interested, I've written an article that mentions some of these issues with the respective context and workarounds:
http://connection.rnascimento.com/2015/03/23/an-approach-to-implement-class-specialisation-in-xml-schemas-xsd/My main message here is that this is an amazing functionality that needs just a few adjustments to be used as great selling point (for you and for me), and potentially replace other competitor (e.g. as I've said, we are only using XML Spy because of the Create Subset functionality).
Regards,
Rodrigo
