Using RTF Master Document with Document Artifacts

[TheProf]

Hi all,

The problem
I’ve created a template that displays the text of any Document Artifacts within a package that the RTF generator is used on. That works great.
However, when this template is attached as the template for a Model Document and used in a Master Document, the contents of the artifacts are not generated into the RTF file. Is this a bug or am I using the tool incorrectly?

The Background
I’m currently involved in generating a Software Design Document (SDD) from the Enterprise Architect model that we’ve developed and I’ve encountered some difficulties with the RTF document generator that I’m hoping to get some help with.

The final SDD will include a combination of free text entered into a word processor and model diagrams and their associated text that have been entered into EA. Ideally, we want to put the entire SDD into EA and use the RTF generator to produce the SDD to reduce the need for double maintenance of the model and the SDD as the model is updated. The ideal situation would be to modify the model, hit a generate button and have the new SDD generated without requiring any additional work.

To achieve this I’ve been adding Document Artifacts to the EA model and writing the descriptive text in these embedded documents. The plan was to use Model Document objects to define the ordering of the presentation of the data and a Master Document object to bring together different sections and different templates into one final, complete document. I have something like the following:

Master Document:SDD
      Model Document: Sections 1-3
            Artifact:Section 1-Preamble
            Artifact:Section 2-Referenced documents
            Artifact:Section 3-Design decisions
      Model Document: Section 4
            Package: Architectural Design
      Model Document Section 5
            Artifact:Section 5-Use Cases

In addition I’ve created an RTF template specifically for extracting the contents of multiple Artifacts and concatenating them together.

So finally, I get to the problem. When I run my template on the package containing the artifacts the template works perfectly. However, when I associate the template with the Model Document and try to use the master document to generate the complete SDD, the contents of the artifacts are NOT in the generated file. I know that the template has been run because text that I manually added to the template is displayed, however the artifact contents are not.

Any help will be greatly appreciated,
Josh.