Copy and paste between projects?

[mcintoshi]

Hi,

A colleague and myself have been working on different copies of a Design Model in EA, and now wish to merge the two.  We're discovering that this is more difficult than we thought.  We're unable to copy and paste between the two diagrams.

If I have both projects open in different EA windows, I then "right click / copy" on my desired package in project 1, and go to the project 2.  I see that the two paste options (Paste objects as Link, Paste objects as New) are greyed out.  I could Paste as an Image from the Clipboard, but that's obviously not what we want.

If I open project 1 and do the copy, then within the same window open project 2, I see that the paste options are there, but when I select Paste as New, I get "Error: Pasting package elements as new not supported".

I must be doing something wrong - any ideas?

cheers,
Ian

[RoyC]

At the moment you cannot copy  packages like that. You have to export them to XMI from Project 1, then import them from XMI to Project 2.

See:

http://www.sparxsystems.com/uml_tool_guide/uml_model_management/importexport.html

[mcintoshi]

Thanks for the answer Roy.  However, it seems that when I do the XMI export/import, the packages get imported but not the package's contents (all our classes).  This overwrites all packages in the destination, not just the ones I tried to export, and quite horribly does not even require a save after this operation - it autosaves - meaning that had I not had a backup I would have lost my entire Design Model.  Although unrelated to my actual problem, surely that autosave is a bug.

Surely there must be a way to export and import just the selected packages in the source model to the destination model?

cheers,
Ian

[lubos]

I think your problem is hidden in this sentence

"..have been working on different copies of a Design Model in EA"

It means your project has elements with the same identification  (ea_guid) and after import (without strip guid) you have rewriten the contens of the model where you import into.
You can avoid this by setting Strip Guid option when importing,  but then you will have the same elements in model twice (with different guid).

actaully I have to merge 10 projects with the same origin into one and it really is a battle if you don't want to loose any information.

[mcintoshi]

Thanks, but even if I copy a package which exists in the source but doesn't exist in the destination, it still doesn't work.

In the end I laboriously reproduced it manually.  An enterprise modelling tool without copy and paste...very frustrating.