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Home Forums eaDocX queries how to generate multiple docs with same template

Viewing 3 posts - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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  • #8421
    Livraison TI
    Participant

    Hi,
    I have a document template that generates all information I need about one particular BPMN process.
    This template has 3 sections:

    • 1 Info section,
    • 1 section about the customer view of the business service provided by the process (this section is linked to a UseCase definition from one part of the EA model)
    • 1 last section with all BPMN diagrams for the process
    • (this section is linked to a package containing all BPMN diagrams and modeling elements for the process in another section of the EA model).

    But now, I also have 200 other business processes from which I would like to generate their specific documentation using the save template and eaDocX profile.
    How do I make 200 documents based on the same template and eaDocX profile that each refers to a specific use cases and a specific process in my EA model?

    #8422
    eadocX Support
    Participant

    Putting-on my Business Analyst hat, I’m not sure I like the idea of having to maintain 200 documents! I would batch them up into groups.
    With my eaDocX hat on, simple answer is “you can’t”.
    You can use ‘Auto Templates’ (see https://store.eadocx.com/help/index.html?auto_templates.htm) to create a family of documents where only one section is different between documents, but not where there are multiple section each of which is different.

    #8423
    Marc Lampron
    Participant

    Thank you for your reply.
    In fact, in our organisation there are presently 5 full time business analysts and each have responsibility over 40ish business processes. So it’s not that difficult to manage, but the reason we want to have each business process in its own document is that, over time we need to have each Business process document versioned independently (by legal obligation). We only keep the current process definition in EA but we need to have one document per Business process.

    The way I try to go about this, is to define a Word document (.DOCX) with the proper eaDocX profiles to generate a document for one particular business process. This is working fine.

    Now, to make multiple instances of this document (1 for each of the business processes, I save the .DOCX as a .DOTX. From the .DOTX word template (that encapsulate all Word format/styles and eaDocX profiles), I can instantiate any number of identical documents as I need with a different business process name but all of them are still referring to the same Business process (when I do a full re-generate of the document with eaDocX).
    The only piece missing is to make each document to refer to a different Business process in the Enterprise model. What I do is:

    1. Open one instance of the eaDocC template (.DOCX file)
    2. In the EA Package Browser I select a Package that contain the proper target process
    3. With the contextual menu, I select Extension :: eaDocX :: Add to document
      … which leads to a sub-menu with the name of the eaDocX document
      … which contain another submenu that let me select the eaDocX section that I want to replace with a profile associate with the selected business process package
    4. at this point, eaDocX ask me if I want to replace the existing profile
    5. I confirm that I want to replace the existing profile
    6. I repeat steps 2 to 5 for each section of the template that need to be reassign to a different Enterprise Architect source of content
    7. Finally, I fully re-generate the document and at this point It seems to work …
      … but somehow the Word heading level gets increase by 1 level by the insertion of the
      first reassign section
      .

    First question: Is that the recommended approach for what I want to do (reuse an eaDocX word template to maintain a family (collection) of documents of the same type? The eaDocX help documentation is not very clear about this type of usage.

    Second question: what could cause the increase of heading level from the original document?

    Thank you very much for your help and advices.

Viewing 3 posts - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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