Printing run-state information

[Phillip Khaiat]

Would like to be able to print out object run state information (Name, value, notes). These attributes (accessible via the RTF generator) do not appear to be accessible in eaDocX.

[eadocX Support]

wow! Never used this, but always wanted to be able to – yet another bit of EA I’ve never been into ! Thanks for pointing this out. I’ll have a look.

[Andreas Jehle]

Hello,

in the EADocX Release Notes (Beta 2.2 of year 2012) there is a statement about printing run-states (New printing of run-states variables for objects).

My question: How can I print runstates – I couldn’t find anything in the users manual about run-states.

regards
Andreas

[eadocX Support]

I had to go back and look at this myself.
There are three kinds of Run State information which you can print:
1 – the Run State name of an Object: this is available from the list of Standard Attributes which you can print for any Object. This prints the value which you can set in EA by selecting the Object, right-click, Advanced | Set Object State. Its a simple string.

2 – you can also print a summary of the Run State Variables (accessed in EA by right-click, Feature and Properties, Set Run State. Here you can give values to attributes of the instance. eaDocX lets you print this as a Standard Attribute, but in the second part of the list which are the ‘Summary attributes’. This will print the Variable (attribute name), operator and Value, as a comma-delimited list. This will work for Tables and Inline printing of Objects

3 – Finally, if you print Objects in Inline style, then there is an additional items in the ‘sub-elements’ tab which print a table of the Run State variables. This will automatically create a Profile for ‘Run State Variable’, where you can then print any of the Run State Variable attributes.

…but you’re quite right – all this should be in the help! I’ll add it to the next help release. Thanks!

[Andreas Jehle]

Thank you for that information – I was searching for that options in the Class profile – where I will need that. Could you provide this feature also for Class elements – editing the XML Profile will print out run-state information also for class elements right now 🙂

[eadocX Support]

How can a class have a run states? Surely only instances of classes can have state values?

[Andreas Jehle]

In a class derivation it is possible to overwrite attributes of the parent class with a constant value – in our concrete project it is used for RESTful interface modelling – where a Parent Class is httpRequest and a Child Class is for example httpPostRequest which overwrites attributes of the parent Class – e.g. http-method = “POST”

In EA the entering of the run-state variables is a little bit different from class instances – but anyway – EA stores it the same way and EADocX prints it the same way (when patching the XML profile for Class elements with run-state information. Menu for entering run-state variables for classes is Right mouse click, Overwrite Attribute Initializers.

regards
Andreas

[eadocX Support]

This is why I love my job – every day people teach me new stuff!
I’ve never used this bit of EA before, but I’ll have a look. We’re currently in the middle of writing the next eaDocX release, but it’s on the list (backlog item #170) for the ‘other stuff’ part of that release.

[Author]

Posts