XMI export - useless ?

[okpaua]

Hi,
I am trying to export xmi for further use in a
j2ee codegen tool called andromda.
- http://andromda.org/
the andromda guys state that xmi comes in a variety of dialects, and they (until now)only support poseidons and magic draws xmi.
I found a bridge to convert between the various dialects
and downloaded an evaluation version
- http://www.metaintegration.net/Products/MIMB/

when I specify "Unisys Rose XMI Interchange" as import format for an EA generated XMI (with option Unisys/Rose checked), the bridge outputs the following:

<STATUS>  (l10:2) Loading the model 'EA Model'
<WARNING> (l29:8) Could not find the object's id
<WARNING> (l49:8) Could not find the object's id
<FATAL>   (l49:8) The object "EJBSessionHomeInterface" is not of the expected type: OBJECT instead of OPERATION  <Monday, December 01, 2003 17:49:49>
<VISUAL MODEL BRIDGE>  An error occured while importing. The model has not been imported.  <Monday, December 01, 2003 17:49:49>

Now I am not sure whether my usage of stereotypes is the problem or the xmi export is simply useless (sorry - I don't mean this as an insult, I just need to let off some frustration).

Needless to say that the stereotypes I use for my classes specify "class" as base class, and the ones for my associations specify "association".
regards,

Olaf

[phtan]

Hi,

I would very much like to do the same thing too using EA to export to XMI and andromda to generate the code, but encounter the same problem as the previous poster.  

The good thing with EA especially it supports adding new profile and stereotypes with predefined tags, which will be very useful for generating to our custom framework and architecture, if the XMI works with Andromda.

Hope someone from Sparx can shed some light on this.  Thx.

[0level]

Hello,
I tried to import EA's XMI into Magic Draw but it fails, too (I tried it with the EAExample). It is very important to do this for us because there will be members in the team who are working on a Mac and cannot use EA. They just have to view the diagrams and could use argoUML, for example.
A Viewer for other platforms would be a great extension for EA!

Cheers
Olaf

[SpoonsJTD]

Something that has plagued XMI as a 'standard' since its inception is that it needs quotes around it, because despite being a 'standard', due to one reason or another (the openness of it, being one) support across tools has been less than perfect.

In my experience, Sparx has done everything possible to make EA as XMI-compliant as possible, and most problems I've had (Visio and Rose) have been because of lack of compliance by the other tools.

I don't know how much the politics play into it as well -- a standard is nice, but many companies probably don't want XMI to be a universal UML file format like the rest of us would like.

Try to determine the level of compliance with the tools you are having problems with, and if the problems are caused by those tools, put pressure on the tool makers to be more compliant.  If the problem is with EA, speak up here.  My personal opinion is that Sparx is committed to XMI and knows that a quality tool beats the pants of politics every day.

It's sad, but the UML community might have to take over the task of standardization by creating stylesheets that 'convert' Company A's XMI to Company B's XMI.

XMI, the UML 'standard'

[maplat]

I created a xsl stylesheet to postprocess the EA XMI output in order to be "compliant" for use with AndroMDA.

At the moment I'm not sure if it works in all situations because I only tested it with some Entities and Entity References which works fine after some tests.

Anyone who is interested in using this stylesheet should contact me by email ([email protected]) in order to receive a copy of the current version.

Also people testing and extending the stylesheet are welcome in order to get a complete stylesheet.