Extracting the glossary by itself

[Jeff Parkhouse]

Hi

I am looking for a way to extract the glssary by itself, as a table, so that I can put it in a Powerpoint induction pack for new starters. I have managed to do it, but it was a long job and there could/should be a quicker way.

Using EA:
– I can export the Project > Reference Data > Glossary, but this produces an xml file.
– csv export only exports packages

Using eaDocX:
– I need a Word document that contains all the terms in the glossary for eaDocX to to include all the terms
– eaXL doesn’t allow for project terms, only packages

What I have done is:
1) Using EA, export out the glossary as an xml file
2) Imported the xml file into Excel. However, being an xml file it was 2 long columns (one with headers, one with details) with 4 rows for each glossary term (name, description, type, glossary ID). If I was clever in Excel I could probably put this into a normal table that looks similar to the Glossary screen in EA (4 colums,one row per glossary term). But I am not.
3) So I created an empty eaDocX Word document.
Copied the table from Excel into eaDocX.
Added an eaDocX glossary section.
Generated the document, and because the terms were in the document, eaDocX generated the glossary section as a table as I wanted.

Is there an easier way?

Thanks
Jeff

[Heather Wallace]

An easier way of getting the whole glossary out is just grabbing the contents from the t_glossary table.

I would do the following:
– Create a local model copy (as an eap file)
– change the extension to .mdb
– Open MS access and use the linked table manager to link to all the tables (or just pick t_glossary)
– Open the table in MS Access and copy the contents into Excel or Word

Of course, you could get this information out via SQL – the glossary fields are Term, Type and Meaning.

I also use Access to more efficiently update the glossary using a local copy. Once the updates are made, Ijust export as XMI and import tthe XMI into the master model.

Hope this helps,

Heather

[Jeff Parkhouse]

Hi Heather

Thanks for the reply. I tried what you suggested and worked fine! You would have thought that there would be an easier method though rather than accessing the back end tables. Maybe an enhancment suggestion for eaDocX…

Regards
Jeff

[Heather Wallace]

Very happy to be of assistance. Before I knew about the back end tables I had to write xslt scripts to convert the xmi int an xmi format that read a sensible set of columns into Excel, and then back again after updates were made (scripts now lost…). MS Access is much easier!

It would be good to have a standard section that simply adds the whole glossary table, or a glossary profile to accomodate sorting by type or term.

Best regards,

Heather

[eadocX Support]

I suppose we could add a simple option to ‘print all’ if that would be helpful. I’ll have a look….

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