Double Table Problem (since 3.9.3.8)

[NSG.ToolSupport]

We register pre- and postcondities with the usecase and print these via the profile as tables. Up until version 3.9.3.8 this worked fine, but starting with that version these tables are also printed for the use case diagram that contains the usecase. The generated document now contains two sets of tables, one directly under the use case diagram and one for the usecase.

Sofar we haven’t found a way to remove the tables under the use case diagram as either both are there or none.

This issue may be related to something else we encountered with this version. We used to have a profile for Activity with “Children” as its only content and a profile for Action to print every action as a row in a table. An action table was printed for each activity diagram this way. Starting with this version we suddenly got a lot of tables and the way to get back to the original action table following the activity diagram we had to drop the profile for activity. So it seems this version introduced something like automatically incorporating children as the use case is a child of the use case diagram and hence the tables for that usecase are printed for the use case diagram.

Enclosed is a small EA repository and an EADOCX document that can be generated to reproduce the problem.

Please help us out with this nasty problem.

[eadocX Support]

The answer is quite simple. You told eaDocX to print the Use Case twice – so it did that.
– first time, you told eaDocX to print the diagram as ‘diagram and contents’. This means you will get (1) the diagram image and (2) all the element in that diagram, printed in the way you specified in the profile for Use Cases. In your case, this is a quite strange: you don’t print the name of the use cases, just it’s pre- and post conditions.

– Later in the document, eaDocX finds the actual use case, in the “Eisen & Condities” package. So, it prints the use case again, using the same profile.

To confuse things a bit more, your document also uses a ‘Diagram Filter’ setting, which tells ALL UseCase diagrams to print as ‘diagram+contents’, so you need to switch that off as well

Solution – reset the ‘diagram filter’, and make the diagram ‘print as normal’.

[NSG.ToolSupport]

Your answer works indeed, however we do have a couple of remarks on this issue.

• The behaviour has changed between the versions 3.9.3.8 and 3.9.4.4 as reported earlier, because in version 3.9.3.8 the document was generated correctly with these settings while in version 3.9.4.4 it was not. There was another comparable issue with the tables printed for an activity diagram. With the new version more tables were printed than in the previous version and we had to remove the profile for activity to get the same result with the new version.
• The filter we had to remove for the usecase to correct the behaviour is still needed for the activity diagram to print the tables underneath the diagram. Which seems a bit inconsistent.
• New software versions that change the behaviour without us knowing, causing completely unexpected results are taking a lot of time for us to investigate. Changes in software are inevitable but it would help if we as users know what exactly has been changed and first and foremost what the consequences of these changes are for our documents. Currently, installing a new version of EaDocX is a major project risk for us regarding leadtime of generated requirementsdocuments.

[Author]

Posts