Shape script for all

[Martin Terreni]

I think you're life's too easy. I'm in charge of implementing the tool in a company with 17000 employees - about 200 designers, thousands of developers/testers and hundreds of business analyst.
With the SW development part it is easier, I tied them to the chair and keep them working as pure UML as possible (and it is quite possible).
Other users (specially BP analysts) have their own - industry oriented - domain language. This is very native in BPS tools (like Aris, WebSphere, etc...) but less for UML tools, so in my world I have to make EA capable of dealing with our industry specific language and standards.
Of course I go UML wise and create the profiles with logical conformity with the underlying UML entities.
Right now we keep Aris for BPA and EA for SW modeling, but even then the interface is such that when we have to do some BPA in EA in the SW design stage - there is the trouble.

Bottom line:  
If you want your modeling tool to hold the intellectual assets of your whole organization as an complete "universe" with all the relations, there is no other choice but to make it complaint with the specific industry.

[«Midnight»]

2. Shape scripts based on tags, especially if they would supplement rather than replace the normal shape script for the object or connector.

Just to be clear, what you want is to define a tag that has its own decoration shape script and can be applied to any kind of element. For example a tag named "Urgency" which would display a red exclamation mark when its value is "High" and can be applied to a class, use case, requirement etc etc.

That's an excellent idea, but seriously non-trivial...

Alternatively - and this is only one approach - you could have something similar to EA's current ability to display an icon (a means of decoration) based on some 'feature' of the element. I think that EA bases this on a stereotype - but I'm not absolutely sure and am not going to check just now, so don't get weird on me about the details - that causes the decoration to appear. Something like a Web Service element will show you this.

EA has several of these. The interesting thing is that EA will render a set of them on a single element, all neatly lined up. We simply cannot do this with shape scripts. Another related problem is that we have no way to capture and reuse the internal images that EA uses for these things; they are not exposed by EA, nor will EA allow us to (easily) use external graphics for our decorations. [There might be a bit of wiggle room here, but just not enough.]

And yes, I've made the feature request.

Twice, once long ago, once while 7.0 was current...

David

[BTW: The ability to base the above on specific tags would be excellent. If the core functionality above was available - it is already in the core rendering engine - then the ability to test for a tag and add another decoration to the 'list' would be able to reuse features already in the shape script language.]