Printing diagrams in Ad-hoc Diagram Approach

[Martin Brachwitz]

We have chosen the Ad-hoc Diagram Approach, because we want to separate our model and the eaDocX document generation completely.
I added an eaDocX diagram to our ‘eaDocX document generation part’, set it to ‘Contents, no diagram’ and used drag & drop to add elements & packages I want to print.
So far so good.
Now I want to add a diagram from the ‘model part’
I added the model diagram to the eaDocX diagram using: Drop Diagram As…

• Diagram Frame
• Diagram Reference
• Hyperlink
• Navigation Cell
• List

While the latter three do not work, the first two options prints information about the diagram (actually the UMLDiagram element created by EA during DnD), but not the diagram itself.

As a work around, I could move the dropped Diagram Frame to a separate ‘eaDocX diagram’, but this ends up with a duplicated diagram frame and I do not find any means to avoid the outer frame. Additionally the diagram caption is the wrong one (the eaDocX diagram rather the model diagram)

It is not an option to copy the diagram from our ‘model part’ to the ‘eaDocX document generation part’, as this would need to be repeated each time the model diagram changes.

Any suggestions?
Thanks

[eadocX Support]

so nothing complicated then..:-)

Would it be possible to email support@ with a sample of what you have in EA (suitably anonymised) and an idea of the document structure you’re aiming at?
All the items you mention above are, i admit, not well handled by eaDocX, for the simple reason that nobody has asked for them before. Frankly, I’m surprised you got as far as you have!
I’m right in the middle of doing eaDocX v4, so any new stuff won’t make it into that release, but I’m stacking up requests for 4.1 already.
I think Christmas is going to be cancelled this year…

[Martin Brachwitz]

Thanks!

I think the Ad-hoc Diagram Approach is very powerful, because you assemble whatever you need for a document by DnD onto one (or more) diagrams and press the ‘Generate Document’ button. We just want to use this approach for diagrams the same way as for elements.
The organisational background for this is that the documents we generate (actually I do) may have completely different structure than the model. I cannot demand modelers (and it would not work) to change structure to be suitable for printing. Occasionally I prepare printable diagrams in the ‘eaDocX part’, but most diagrams are maintained by modelers in the ‘model part’
So, we would be very pleased if you make this possible. (We do not need it before Christmas… 🙂 )

[eadocX Support]

BTW – you can achieve a similar effect using EA Model Views. Just create a ‘favorites’ MV in Ea, and add the elements/diagrams/packages to it, then get eaDocX to print the MV. Useful if the diagram you would otherwise create is just a placeholder for ‘stuff’.
Obviously, if the diagram is useful, then this doesn’t apply…

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