Author Topic: Managing Attributes  (Read 8578 times)

leonf

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Managing Attributes
« on: May 15, 2003, 05:57:42 am »
I am reasonably new to EA, so maybe I just need some good guidance on the following:

Managing full context definitions of an attribute is very useful for the entire organisation, including the datawarehouse. This also assists tremendously in setting up and maintaining messaging throughout the enterprise, as well as to external organisations.

A substantial amount of time was used to manage attributes within the project. In order for us to achieve both an XML tag name and a unique field sequence number we had to misuse EA, which off course is not a good idea. We then used Access to extract the class and attribute tables and merge these to create a data dictionary. We could then compare similar attributes and sort out their definitions.

Attributes appear in many classes
- Entity class
- Message class
- Proxy class
- Front End class, which is a form of proxy class
- Distributed databases

In the context of XML the attribute requires a tag name which is limited in length to get manageable massage sizes. It is also useful to assign a number to an attribute to limit message size and to manage enterprise wide attributes.

The attribute also needs a full name that is self-descriptive.

Suggestion:
Enable any attribute to be specified as an “object” in its own right. The attribute can then be associated with various classes. I would like the attribute to have a short name and a field identity number. The short name can then be used for XML definition or in a dictionary.


Thanks
Leon