Diagram Contents
A diagram may contain elements from many parts of your model, and it’s sometimes useful to print all those elements in one place, immediately under the diagram.
For example, suppose you are documenting some new aspect of the company technical architecture. You may have some existing components which have already been defined, possibly in another part of the model to which you have read-only access. You want the descriptions of those to appear in your document, alongside your new components.
So, simply drag the existing components into an EA diagram, then right-click on the diagram in the eaDocX Preview page.
This gives some new options.
Diagram Options
Normal – this just prints the diagram in your document
– Diagram and all Contents. This will print the diagram, and the details of all the elements which appear in the diagram, wherever in your model the elements are*. The elements will print using the element formatting options which have been specified in the Profile for the rest of the document. In this way, you can create an EA diagram with elements drawn from many places in your model, but have all the elements printed together, under the diagram.
– Contents no Diagram – this is the same as ‘Diagram and all contents’, except the diagram itself is not printed.
Note that using this feature allows you to gather together on one diagram elements from a range of locations in your model in order to create a bespoke document for specific purposes. For more information see “The Ad-hoc Diagram Approach” in Using Diagrams.
– Exclude Diagram – just don’t print the diagram at all.
* Note that if the owner of those existing components moves them somewhere else in the model, your diagram will still print correctly, as it’s the contents of the diagram that are printed, regardless of where the elements came from.
See Additional Options for diagram connectors
How the Contents get Printed
When eaDocX prints the contents of the document, it will use the Profiles for each of the element types & stereotypes in the diagram. If the diagram contains an element type which has no profile, then it just won’t print.
The sequence in which the contents are printed is:
- Items which print as Tables. If there are many different kinds of elements, these will appear in A-Z alphabetical order of their element type, or element type <<stereotype>>
- Items which print Inline. If there are many different kinds of elements, these will also appear in A-Z alphabetical order of their element type, or element type <<stereotype>>, with similar element types grouped together.
- Any Packages which are in the diagram (this is another way to get a whole new document structure)