Documenting Data Mapping

[Adam Powers]

I am using the EA “connect to element feature” functionality to create data mappings between two classes. For example: http://www.sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/10/modeling_basics/connect_to_element_feature.html

I am new to eaDocX Excel and I am trying to figure out how to create a spreadsheet that shows: Source Class Name, Source Attribute Name, Destination Class Name, Destination Attribute Name, and Relationship Notes. I’m guessing that “Add Relationship Feature” in eaDocX is the way to do this, but I can’t figure out how to show the relationships between attributes.

Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated.

[Ken Norcross]

From my reading the attribute-to-attribute association information is stored in the “StyleEx” string for the association itself.

In this string Sparx stores the GUID of the attribute element(s) involved in the association.

The two ends of the association are still the regular elements, the extra attribute information is stuffed in this StyleEx string of the association.

I don’t see any easy way to translate the stored GUIDs when using eaDocx.

This should be doable using a script, and letting eaDocx invoke the script.

[eadocX Support]

Looking at the eaDocX code which finds this data, KenN is quite right that its in the StyleEx field of the connector between the elements, where the StyleEx is either “LFSP” or “LFEP”

[Ken Norcross]

“…the eaDocX code which finds this data…”

So is there an eaDocX feature that can expose this information in an output document?

[eadocX Support]

Yes – there are standard attributes (of most element types) which are ‘Element Feature link’ and ‘Element Feature link Alias’. These will print most of this stuff which is connected by the EA Element Feature linking mechanism, and print either the name (hyperlinked) or the Alias(hyperlinked) of the target of the link.
At the moment (as if v3.5) these Element Feature Links don’t appear in the ‘Model Expert’ meta-model bit of eaDocX: we’re working on an update to this to discover these more obscure corners of EA!

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