Bug Report – Relationship Matrix

[Wagner Schalch Mendes]

In my EA project (SysML project) I have a relationship matrix between requirements and activities through the ‘satisfy’ relationship. Since I have a considerable amount of requirements, this matrix becomes big. When I ask eaDocX to put that matrix in the document using the compact form, the matrix is bad formatted. I’m attaching an extract of the document highlighting the problem and my document profile.

Word: 2010
EA: 9.3.935
eaDocX: 3.2.8.6

[eadocX Support]

I have looked at your output document (thanks) and everything looks normal, apart from the extra, wide column at the right-hand side, which I can’t reproduce.
Is that what you are concerned about?
Other than that, this is exactly what a ‘compact’ formatted eaDocX Matrix Report should look like: it’s useful where there are a very large number of columns, which are too wide to fit into a page, so ‘compact’ style lista rows and columns down the page.
A 50×50 matrix will JUST fit into a Portrait-orientation format, A4 page when done in ‘normal’ style, as we write the column text vertically.

What were you expecting ?

[Wagner Schalch Mendes]

Thanks for the support.
In fact, if you look carefully, it seems that the table has been truncated in requirement ‘SDU_SwRS_070’ (42th row) due to A4-Portrait limit. Relationships for all the requirements in the above rows will not be represented in the matrix. For example, try to find the line where a relationship for requirement ‘SDU_SwRS_016’ (1st row) would be put in the matrix. You won’t be able to.
This compact representation is really great, but it seems my matrix goes beyond the 50×50 limit, right? I even tried to use a A3 page in Landscape orientation (to give more room for the matrix).
I was expecting to have the complete matrix when I changed my page to a A3-Landscape format.
I hope my problem is more clear now.
Thanks again!

• This reply was modified 11 years, 10 months ago by Wagner Schalch Mendes.

[eadocX Support]

I have tried creating a 100×100 matrix, and I am now seeing the same strange formatting as you – will investigate further!

[eadocX Support]

OK – problem identified.
eaDocX is correctly producing valid HTML which it is passing to Word, but Word seems to be ‘helping’ by doing strange things to the table when it is put into the document. In my tests, this seems to happen when there are more than about 62 columns: at that point, the table is too wide to fit onto the page (an A3, Landscape page) and Word start to do strange stuff.
As this is happening inside Word, there’s not much I can do.
– I will test with Word 2013 shortly, to see if there are any differences – I’m not hopeful
– In eaDocX 3.3 we have a new feature for Matrix reports which means you can get them to print only rows/columns where this is data. This makes sparse matrices more readable. Maybe this will help.
– I also have a prototype HTML viewer which displays the data correctly, but this won’t be available until later in the year.
Until then, I can only suggest you create more, smaller matrix reports. 🙁

[Wagner Schalch Mendes]

Maybe we could have the option to insert the relationship matrix in the document as a file (HTML, CSV, or the format used to preview the report). I think this could be a good evolution to eaDocX.

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