Ability to treat a file as a base project

[Knaldgas]

In order to aid people working with EA, it could be nice to able to present them with a list of predefined base projects (through Windows Explorer), and on opening that base project, a new project is initiated.

I can think of two simple solutions:

• Accept a file extension of *.EAT (EA Template), which will open as if "copy base project" was chosen inside EA.
• Saving a file that was opened read-only could give the option to save as a new project

~Per

[qwerty]

As a first step you can simply replace the EABase.eap in the EA program folder with your own template. It's only one, but it can have that stuff in it you will commonly use in your domain.

q.

[Knaldgas]

Yes, that will work if you have one template, but if you have more than one, that's not really an option.
I can create a number of MDG's with model templates, but that requires some expert steps (like manually editing MTS-files), and registering MDG's.

EA does not like to open read-only files at all (refers to EA lite to view them), so why not just use that as an easy option for choosing among any number of templates?

~Per

[qwerty]

Probably not too hard to implement. The questions are: will you get enough followers on your request and will Sparx take it into consideration?

q.

[Uffe]

Hello,


A special file type which on opening causes EA to automatically reset all GUIDs (which is what Copy a Base Project does) would be nice, but I wouldn't consider it a priority.

The Create New Enterprise Architect Project dialog (ie the one opened by Copy a Base Project) has a Browse button which allows you to select any .EAP file as a base project, so you can already achieve essentially the function you're after. All you need to do is create your template projects, make them available on a network drive (or place them in the EA installation folder if you're repackaging) and inform your users where to find them. All of which you would need to do if there was a special template file type as well.

The one thing I think a template file type would add, except for the convenience of creating a new project from the Windows Explorer, is the ability to specify in the template whether GUIDs should be reset (which they shouldn't if you're using external version control). But I'm not at all sure that EA can work purely in-memory without a file to write to the way Word can, so likely the first thing that would happen after opening the template would be that EA would open the Save Project dialog to force you to create the file. Which means the convenience, as compared to the current Copy a Base Project function, isn't all that much higher.


I like your other suggestion more, but I'll go you one better.

At present, opening a read-only file results in first an error message which many users won't understand, then an EA client with the Open Project dialog opened. It would be better with something along these lines:

• Message box text: "This file is read-only. While the EALite client (which is free to download) can be used to access read-only files, the full EA client requires write access to all project files. Would you like to open a different project, or use this file as a base for a new project?"
• Button "Open": opens Open Project dialog (current behaviour).
• Button "Copy Base": opens Create New Project dialog with the read-only file filled in as the Model Project.
• Button "Cancel": exits.

If you want to get really fancy you could also check whether EALite is installed and offer to open that instead. But that aside, this slight reinterpretation of the read-only flag that you suggest sounds very reasonable to me and an implementation as outlined should be achievable with a minimum of work.


/Uffe