Automatically insert Glossary entries

[lad4bear]

Hi guys,

I have a fair number of items in my glossary. Rather than making lots of "see Glossary" style comments throughout my scenarios, I'd like to be able to include the actual glossary item. Is it possbible to have EA insert the referenced glossary automatically?

Cheers,

Pete

[«Midnight»]

Hi Pete,

What exactly do you mean by "insert?" Do you want some way for EA to put this in the Notes field of a scenario as you are typing? Or do you want some kind of hyperlink or something?

Scenarios use the same editor functionality as any (other) notes field in EA. We (the user community at large) have been asking for rich text - of some kind, as long as it is 'richer' than what we have now - for a while. Still no traction from Sparx.

David

[lad4bear]

i guess what i'd really like is to be able to use some sort of token i.e $glossary:itemname$ so that when the document is generated the token is replaced by the value stored in the glossary. and yip a rich text editor would be very nice

cheers, pete

[«Midnight»]

But in the meantime you seem to be looking for something along the lines of a code generation function, but for report generation.

What you'd need is some way of looking up a term. You also would need a way to identify the term in the first place (so the report generator would know that it should look up this term, and not try to look up everything). Finally, you might want a function to determine if the glossary currently contains a given term.

I don't think any of these in currently in EA, although you could write an add-in. Still, that's a kludgey way to generate a report, and would likely complicate the 'normal' way you'd use EA.

Anyone got any ideas on this?

[thomaskilian]

We had a related thread to use hyperlinked glossary elements.

You wouldn't believe what you can get when you leave that silly MS world. Making TeX the basis of your documentation will give you a real kick...

[«Midnight»]

But Thomas, that would require people to have TeX in order to reap the benefits.

Sure things aren't anywhere near as good now, but at least everyone has Word, don't they?  

[Graham_Moir]

Given how expensive Office/Word is, I think the answer is no they don't.

[mikewhit]

i guess what i'd really like is to be able to use some sort of token i.e $glossary:itemname$ so that when the document is generated the token is replaced by the value stored in the glossary

Sounds like a page of Perl to me.

On the subject of Office - bought my copy of Office 97 (including Access) for £30 a few years ago at a computer fair, and I'm still using it.

[«Midnight»]

And there's always WordPad, which is also an RTF reader. Some time ago - close to but either side of 2000 - MS even published source for a WordPad clone as a sample application. I have no idea where my copy is, or whether I even acquired it.

[thomaskilian]

My first word-processor was SCRIPT on an IBM mainframe. Something very hypertext-like (now claimed to be kind of "state-of-the-art"; haha!) That was nice output for that time. Then I completely switched to Atari. A naked Word called 1st-Word. Like Wordpad, but better as it did not need any MS scrap. Then I helped my wife to TeX her thesis and became infected. This was really beautiful output (and it was mathematical text!). This Word-stuff I used simply because everyone was using it. It was always like hell. Remebered to save? No? Usually just after the crash. So what is better with the current Word? That it has around 10000 function of which a standard user needs 5-10?

And have you ever tried to program in TeX? This is really something for hardcore programmers. Probably on the same level as Brainfuck

P.S. I don't use any of the MS Office stuff. OpenOffice is the same scrap, but for free. So that doesn't hurt in the end and I can read files.

[bioform]

I don't know much about TEx, but I use Access/MS Word for almost all of my model reporting needs, and think it is a very powerful approach... Currently I am able to generate a complete System Requirement Specification on demand using this  approach... It allows me to spend my time modeling my system requirements, use cases, and business objects.

My next attempt will to generate a SDD along a similar approach...

Regardless of how you feel about MS, it has been the primary tools I have used in Government, then Military, and in my time in the private sector...