Creating a table with only ‘initial values’ shown

[Joseph Rose]

Hello,
I am currently evaluating EADocX for our team, with a view to purchasing a floating license. We have more or less given up with the Sparx EA RTF document generator, and hoped for great things from EADocX.

However, I’ve run into problems even sorting out the title page.

1) For the document header, I want to add a 3×2 table generated by EADocX that contains:

———————————————————————————————————————————-
| | – Level 1 design | Revision |
|prepared by: | Authorised by : | Issue Date: |
———————————————————————————————————————————-

This should come from a class object ‘document header’ which contains these details.
a) For each attributes, I set an ‘initial value’ and want to display ONLY the initial values in the table
b) I can find a way to display the initial values but EADocX insists on displaying this ‘inline’
c) When I try to add the EADocX section to the Word 2010 document header, the tags appear in the main document and not in the header.

2) For the title page, I insert the company logo statically, but again I want to populate the page from another class ‘document title page’, displaying only the initial values. This time I want to centre the contents and not have the table borders display when the document is generated . Is there a way to do this ?

Regards
Joe

[eadocX Support]

Hi Joe.
Not sure eaDocX can print what you need, at least not starting from Initial Values of attributes.
We have, however, spent quite a bit if time thinking about how to make header pages easier to automate.
Have you looked at adding a ‘Document Information section? This gives to 20+ attributes which you can add, some from the Word document, others from eaDocX e.g. Author, date/time. Where there aren’t fields you need, you could hijack them for ones which you do need.
I suggest displaying the Document Information section as ‘Inline’ but with two horizontal inline tables: just click the check-box next to the attribute, and fiddle around to get tables which run across the page.
This probably won’t give you exactly what you want, at least not sourcing it from Initial Values on your model, but should get you quite close. It’s one of the things which we’ve had to get used to with eaDocX: we can’t deliver 100% customisation AND a sensible user experience: the Sparx RTF has gone the other way : 100& customisable, poor Ux.
You’ll have an alternative in eaDocX 3.3, where you can define you own custom fixed-value attributes, but these are kept in the document, not in the model.

Thanks
Ian

[Joseph Rose]

Hello Ian,
I have to disagree with you on the subject of customisation. If you look at Word 2010, there is the concept of ‘styles’ and these are, like the EADocX profiles, designed to enforce some standards and ease of use when it comes to formatting.

There are, however, a few times when you do need to extend or modify a style in MS Word, and you select the text and just manually change it. MS Word then dynamically creates a new style ‘Heading 2 + Font 14pt’ – you can see the origin, and you can see the change from the standard.

Also, I would strongly suggest that you are able to pull everything from the model itself, rather than resorting to extending MS Word document properties. It should be possible to pull just the values from a particular class, ignoring the headings, format it into a table and put this in the document header. If this is done, then it’s quite easy for a lead architect or architecture manager to ensure that all document headers contain the right information, including legal statements – quite important on public sector or regulator-driven work.

Unfortunately, in many cases, if we cannot use EADocX to exactly match the format of the hand-crafted design documents (and it should be possible) then there are loads of manual steps afterwards to sort things out. This leads to lack of interest and ultimately loss of confidence in the tool.

There’s quite a high price being charged for this tool, and during my evaluation it has thrown exceptions and errored out a handful of times, which I wasn’t expecting. I was following a handwritten document and one of the EADocX exceptions also caused this MS Word session to crash too, and I then had to repair the document afterwards …

I’d like to park my review for now and not conclude things until the new version appears. It IS a lot easier to get started with document generation with EADocX than it is with Sparx RTF, but my concerns are around the customisation options – if these are not there, then we might hit a brick wall.

Regards
Joe

[eadocX Support]

I’d like to revise my previous post: I just remembered some stuff I built for another customer, but which has yet to make it into the online help (i’ll fix this for 3.3) – it’s available in 3.2.

This is only available in eaDocX Corporate Version, as it uses eaDocX Document Management.

When you put a document under eaDocX DM, it will create an <>Artifact element in your model for each document, with children for each of the versions of that document which you then create.

If you add Tagged Values to that <>Artifact, then those TaggedValues are automatically made into Word Custom Properties next time you re-generate your document, and populated with the value of the TV.
To add them to the document, select Word | Insert | QuickParts | Field | DocProperty, and your new TaggedValues will be there in the list.

So, you can create a 100% customised Word table in you header, using the values of these TVs. Bit of a fiddle first time around, but save the document as a Word template, and each new document will look the same.

It doesn’t pull the data from exactly where you wanted, but the document data is stored in your EA model, and in a fairly logical place.

I take the point about the reliability of v3.2: we’re going to be doing much more testing of 3.3, but we rely on customers telling us about problems, as there are a infinite number of models out there, and about the same number of possible documents.

You also mention Word styles: was that just an example, or have you yet to use the eaDocX feature which makes use of your Word style definitions? And Word Table styles as well!

As for the price we’re charging, I reckon it’s less than 1/2 a days work for a good IT professional. and if it doesn’t pay you back inside the first month, let me know, and I’ll refund the licence fee!

[Joseph Rose]

Hello Ian,
Thanks for your quick response. Trying not to be overly critical here, as I think there’s great potential in the tool.

If there is a method of taking the tagged values from an EA artefact , then that would work for me. A bit of a fiddle , but workable once you get used to it.

I do take your point about all the potential integration scenarios (now we can add EA10 and Word 2013) and the millions of permutations in the documents. The sad fact is that it doesn’t take much of a discrepancy between a handcrafted format which has been agreed between Architecture and Service Delivery and what comes out of a document generator for the latter’s output to be rejected. We see a lot of uses for this tool, not just in Architecture documents, but bids and invitations to tender as well….

I’d like to park our evaluation and wait for version 3.3 and will be write back and request another trial key and try to come to a final decision about whether we can go forward with this as a team.

Keep up the good work !

Regards
Joe

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