Order of tables

[Tage Korsdal Nielsen]

I have a diagram showing relationships between some requirements, use cases and components. Each type of element has it’s own table.

How may I specify the order of these tables?

Rgds
Tage

[eadocX Support]

Short answer – you can’t, just because there is nowhere in EA or eaDocX to say what the order should be. This is because the order in which EA saves the elements of a diagram is just the order in which you created them, which is usually meaningless.
Just to make it predictable, eaDocX prints the elements in the order of the their element types, so ‘Decisions’ come after ‘Changes’ but before ‘Requirements’.
If you can suggest somewhere where you can specify the order, I am open to ideas!

[Tage Korsdal Nielsen]

On the package level everything is fine by sticking to the order of EA. That is exactly as I expect it to be.

But maybe if you, beneath the “Hx” heading node in “Preview”, could reorder the individual tables to reflect the order you want in the document.

Rgds
Tage

[eadocX Support]

The problem with that solution is that eaDocX does not know what it needs to print until it opens the diagram, and asks EA for its contents. So you would have to specify the order for each table for each diagram.
But when the contents of the diagram change, perhaps the order would no longer make sense: maybe some items deleted, some more added.
We have thought about this before, but we can’t see how to make it a good user experience.
…but we’ll look at it again for v3.4, as you’re right that it’s a problem worth fixing.

[Heather Wallace]

A suggestion from Cardiff (easiest if you have EA10 with floating windows):

If you have a diagram where the order of output is really important, make a blank copy and then copy and paste (as link) the contents from the orginal version into the new diagram in the order you want them output. EA remembers the position of each item as it pastes, and automatically adds the links, so it is not as big an effort as it might sound. You can tell if you have a suitable order by viewing the tracability window for the whole diagram.

HTH
Heather

[Author]

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