Adding data to an eaSheets ‘Smart Sheet’

An eaSheets ‘Smart Sheet’ is a special kind of eaSheet: it shows not just information about a list of elements, but also how each elements connected to other elements.

And it already knows how to connect those elements, so you, and your users, don’t need to know. But the correct connectors types will be used when the elements are connected.

This is a sheet which has been created from an EA Package which contains just one Template Element (see Template Elements).

It’s smart, because it already has all the columns you need to populate: the EA fields and tagged values, and the names of all the related elements you want to connect.

Adding your data

eaSheets ‘Smart Sheets’ make adding the data really easy.

You can either:

• Type the data by hand, choosing which existing data to connect to
  OR
• paste data from somewhere else
  OR
• any combination of both techniques.

Whatever to need to get your data into EA quickly and accurately

Adding data manually

To create data manually, you can use all the normal features of a spreadsheet, like cut/copy/paste, or simple type the data into the appropriate cells. This is MUCH faster than opening the properties of each element, or even using the EA ‘List View’.

But this gets really cool when it comes to adding related elements -which is usually the hard part.

Now you have two options:

• Choose ‘add related element’, and pick an element which is already created
  OR
• Just type the name of a new element, and eaSheets will create it for you.

If you don’t know if it exists already, just type the name, and eaSheets will find it if it exists, or create a new element if it doesn’t.

Importing data

It’s more realistic to assume that you will import data from somewhere, but that ‘somewhere’ won’t have data all neat and ready for EA.

But eaSheets is fine with that.

Re-importing data

Because of the way eaSheets imports your data, if you need to refresh the data, eaSheets won’t duplicate elements or connectors. It will create new ones where needed, but it will leave you to delete un-wanted connectors.

Note

All this magic depends on one important thing: the names of elements. When you put the name of an element into a column for related data, eaSheets will search your model for an element of the correct type, stereotype and NAME.

• If you have many elements with the same name, element type and stereotype, then eaSheets doesn’t know which one to choose, so it won’t create a connector.
• If it can’t find any elements, then it will create a new one (see video above).