Report of requirements

[J.Bijleveld]

Hi,

I'm quite new to using Enterprise Architect but I like it a lot. Especially the idea of having it all in one place consistenly is very appealing to me.

Therefore I started to add requirements in the Use Cases. I would like to use those requirements then to create a report that I can present to the customer. However, I didn't yet succeed in doing so.

I hope anyone can tell me how to create such a report. I already tried to uncheck all other things except for the Requirements checkbox and then create an RTF document bu that didn't work.

Thanks for any comments,

Jeroen

[mch]

Hi Jeroen,
I had a look at this and was surprised to find that this didn't seem to be possible through the RTF generator.

There are two types of requirements in EA - internal and external. They are held in two different tables and the EA interface combines them. Internal reqs are the ones that don't seem to appear on the EA RTF report. I can think of a few options for you (increasing order of complexity)

1. Try the HTML generator, it may meet your documentation needs.

2. Convert your internal requirements to external. I ususally put them in their own package and run the RTF generator over that. Downside is that the useful concept of internal vs. external requirements is lost.

3. Query the database directly. In our MS Access implementation, internal requirements are held in the "t_objectrequires" table (external requirements are held in the "t_object" table with an object_type of "Requirement").

4. Use the EA Automation API to write a routine to extract and reformat the requirement details into the word processing format of your choice.

Hopfully these ideas will work for you. You should probably take a backup copy of your project before trying these out.

I've used all of these and  relied heavily on the database query option - my data architecture background coming through. This wasn't good enough for my current project so I invested the time in learning to use the API automation and wrote a C# program to automatically produce a formated MS Word document.  I can produce different reports depending on my audience from the same EA model with the same look and feel. This took a while but was very successful - well worth my effort. As an example while typing this reply I received a query, produced a detailed use case report, and sent it off. It took about 3 minutes.

Regards,
Mark

[J.Bijleveld]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the advise! I thought I perhaps overlooked the option in the RTF report generator.

It looks to me that your requirements reportgenerator should be very useful to other users as well. Would you be interested to share it so your star can rise to great height in the Enterprise Architect sky?  

At least I would be very interested to try it.
For Sparx Systems it might be an idea to create a section on their website for publishing plugins like these to encourage sharing valuable add-ons amongst their users.

Thanks in advance for your time!

Best regards,
Jeroen

[mch]

Hi Jeroen,

I'm certainly interested in sharing but at the moment it's not really ready for general distribution. I've set it up to fit my specific analysis process and document standards, so need to make it a lot more general. And a bit more bullet proof...

Drop me a line if I can help further, maybe I could look at amending my program to meet your specific needs? That would be useful to me as I would get a different perspective and some insights into what works and what doesn't. Let me know.

Cheers,
Mark