How to show full package (namespace) name

[micdev42]

How to show full package (namespace) name on a package diagram?
Say I have some nested packages I have defined:
A contains B which contains C which contains D.
If I drop D onto a diagram its name is shown as D.

How to I get it to show a name of A.B.C.D ?
i.e. the fully qualified name.

Thanks
Michael

[SomersetGraham]

Hi Michael
You can set the diagram properties to show the parent package.
You need to set Show Namespace on the Diagram tab of the diagram properties dialog. This will not show the fully qualified name, however.

[micdev42]

I have seen this setting thanks.
So there's no way to show the FQN?

[SomersetGraham]

Hi
Not as far as I know

[Ericga]

If you ever find a way, please post it. I tried asking for the feature (18 months ago and still waiting) and I also reported it as a bug in the latest beta. No result. Sparks doesn't even recognize why this is an issue(!). So we are now recommending alternative products to our 2000+ corporate customers.

[micdev42]

Hi, what other products are you recommending?
I too get the feeling that Sparx isn't particularly interested in taking on board suggestions and doing anything about them.

As I see it EAs major plus point is that it's reasonably priced and that offsets the other issues. I'd be interested to have a look at alternatives.

[Geert Bellekens]

If enough people request the feature then Sparx will probably implement it.
In the meantime you might be able to work something out using the alias field.
This is a field that can be shown on diagrams instead of the name.
You could fill that field with the qualified name using the API. (or even directly in the database)

Geert

[micdev42]

Geert,
Thanks. Although not a real fix the Alais might be a useful work around.

[Ericga]

I know about the alias field but we have over 12 thousands classes and feeding that field automatically is not straightforward in the professional version. Also notice the fully qualified name is not even available in the Properties dialog of an entity. The only way to know which entity you are dealing with is to locate it in the project browser.

This is rather stupid. We are not asking for a special feature but only to be able to see the NAME of the class. How can you work with something without seeing its NAME? You don't need a phd to realize this is an extremely basic "feature". Not being able to see which class we are looking at is absurd. It is not a stellar request requiring 100+ hours of development either. The same problem can be seen in many panes (ex: Relationships) because names are truncated by default.

I'm using EA internally when designing new stuff but we are now recommending both commercial and open source alternatives to our corporate customers because EA doesn't fill their need for diagrams and Sparx doesn't care.

[Ericga]

We are now recommending Rational Rose (expensive) and Poseidon http://www.gentleware.com/(cheap) and ArgoUML http://argouml.tigris.org/ (free) depending on the customer need. We are also looking at others like http://www.visual-paradigm.com/

I still do prefer working with EA except it is unusable for our customers in its current state and I can't spare a developer to create and maintain a EA add-in to fix basic EA gaps.

[beginner]

EA is still the one-eyed amongst the blind. I always wonder why there isn't simply "good" software. At a reasonable price. Heaven knows.

b.

[Geert Bellekens]

I know about the alias field but we have over 12 thousands classes and feeding that field automatically is not straightforward in the professional version. Also notice the fully qualified name is not even available in the Properties dialog of an entity. The only way to know which entity you are dealing with is to locate it in the project browser.

Eric, creating an addin is as easy in the profesional version as it is with any other version.

If you need the FQN you can get from the context menu:
Copy Reference/Copy Node Path to Clipboard

Geert

[Ericga]

Geert,

I know creating add-ins is easy but we are not just using EA internally but also promoting it to our own corporate customers. If we need to supply an add-in for them to use it it must go through the whole product delivery workflow (specs, dev, QA, delivery, training, documentation, support, etc.) which cost 10x the price of the software. It is much simpler to tell them to buy something else which we don't have to support directly because it works out of the box. If they want 10 or 100 licenses they just buy it and we don't get bothered.

[Geert Bellekens]

Can't argue with that (and I'm not interested to do that either).

If you find a better product please let us know your experience.

Geert

[fwoolz]

Feature request sent...

This one seems worth a pile-on.