Automated Report Generation options

[rwdaigle]

I am a newbie to EA and have attempted to peruse the help contents to find the answer to my question, but nothing popped out at me.

We currently maintain Use Case diagrams in EA and the full Use Case descriptions and meta-data in Excel.  Keeping these two synchronized is a pain, but we like being able to see (in the Excel spreadsheet) a listing of all use cases by package, use case name, priority etc...

Is there a way to generate one tabular view of all use cases contained within a project from the use case diagrams in EA?  So far the closest I've seen is the report view which only lists the current diagram and doesn't inlude all the columns we need.

Is the only way to do this to plug into the automation engine and manually generate this report?  Or export to XML and use XSL to generate the report?

Any help or pointer in the right direction would be great.

Thanks in advance.

[Tjerk]

Try the Relationship matrix, select the project as source. Then select UseCase as source type. You should get a list of all UseCases in your project. Then Use File/Export to CSV and import the CSV into Excel.

Good luck,
Tjerk

[charge]

Why don't you store your Use Case Meta data in EA ? When you do that, you don't have to sync and you can use a nice EA report.....

[rwdaigle]

Yeah, that was kind of the point of me asking the question.  Instead of maintaining two seperate documents, I'd like to put it all into EA and have it generate the equivalent of the excel output.

I did what Tjerk recommended above, but that only gives me a single listing of the use cases, which is nice but I need a matrix style listing (use cases down the left column and their properties along the top - description, scenarios etc...)

[igortorfs]

What I'm currently doing is putting all use case data (use case specs) into the EA model.

To have a use case list, I do a CSV export with EA and then a CSV import in Excel.


The problem that we encountered was that the list of use cases was not structured. Therefore we added a number in the keyword field of each use case, included that in the CSV export and sort the Excel based on the keyword number.



Another option is to do an XML export and use an XSLT transform to get to a use case list. A collegue of mine created such an XSLT in a day. This had the advantage of retaining the structure of the use cases (being summary, user, subfunction level use cases).

Hope this helps
Kind regards
Igor

[charge]

I also put all my Use Case data into EA.
To have a nice up-to-date overview of the project I created a ASP.NET page that uses the EA Automation Interface. I created this page in a day.

I don't use a standard structure to show the use cases. The structure is dependent on the selection criteria.