eadocX Support

[eadocX Support]

I have, and the challenge is that EA doesn’t store the sequence of the alternates/exceptions anywhere. I’m going to have to find a way of working-out what the sequence is…

[eadocX Support]

Really have fixed it this time – in 3.6.2.3 now available

[eadocX Support]

eaDocX will let you print any attribute of the connector between two elements, as well as any tagged value of that connector. But you can’t document a connector on its own, only in the context of the elements at one of its ends.
If you think this is what you want to do, then this is often because what you have modeled as a connector is better modeled as an element.
For example, if you wanted to model a telecoms connection between two boxes, it maybe feels natural to make that connection into an EA Connector.
..but I’d always make it an Element, so that it can have its own independent existence, be put on diagrams etc.

[eadocX Support]

Sort answer – no.
Longer answer:
I visit one or two customers each week, and have been doing for for 15 years, and I have yet to see two customers document their designs/Architecture in the same way.
At the last EA User Group meeting in Minneapolis, there was some discussion about this, mostly observing the same thing: we seem to invent it for each customer.
As for 4+1, I personally haven’t seen this for ages – I had no idea it was still current!

[eadocX Support]

Sorry about this. It’s caused by eaDocX looking for a new method which was shipped with ea V12, build 12, which allows your eaDocX documents inside EA.
Can you try deleting the file EA Interop.dll from your eaDocX install directory: this should let eaDocX discover what version you are running, and only call this method if you’re on the right EA version. We mistakenly included this DLL which fools eaDocX into thinking you are using the latest EA version. I’m not in the office at the moment, so I can’t test this. Please can you reply here if this fix works.

[eadocX Support]

So, having established we are talking about copying of Profiles, not sections….:-)

– If you have a profile defined for a non-stereotyped element, if you then choose to create a profile for a stereotype of that element, eaDocX will default to copying the profile for the non-stereotyped element into the stereotyped one. On the basis that they are likely to be ‘similar but different’

– to copy profiles from one element type to another, you can edit the Profile xml:
1. Save the Profile to a file, from the eaDocX File menu
2. Edit the Profile XML. Each attribute of each element type/stereotype has a line in the profile like:

PLEASE take a backup of your documents before trying this: this is un-documented, non-public function, so you’re doing this at you own risk!

Thanks

[eadocX Support]

I’m confused – how is this an eaDocX question?

[eadocX Support]

Just to be clear, eaDocX doesn’t share any function or approaches with the native EA RTF generator. They are totally separate.
I think eaDocX can get you most of the way to what you need, if I understand you correctly.
As I understand it, you’re printing Activity details, and, if they are linked to a Requirement with the appropriate status, some details of the requirement as well.
Out of the box, I don’t think either RTF of eaDocX will do this.
One way to get close to what you need is to:

– in the eaDocX Profile for ‘Activities’, add a Relationship Attribute, using your Realization relationship, and get it to print the ‘Name – hyperlink’ of the Requirement

– then create a separate section – maybe in an appendix – containing an Element Report, which is a ‘Cross Reference’ report, and make it print ‘Requirements’, but give a filter (in the ‘Advanced’ page of the Element report) with your “Status = something’

What eaDocX then does is to (1) try to print hyperlinks to ALL kinds of Requirement, but only those in the report get resolved.
If you drop an email to support@eadocx.com, I can send you what I tried, so you can see if it’s enough.

BTW – I didn’t realize that eaDocX could combine a ‘Cross Reference’ Element Report with a filter. Nice to learn something new!

[eadocX Support]

Ah – I think I see what you’re trying to do – create a normal eaDocX profile which filters-out elements with a particular status value.
eaDocX can’t currently do that…
…except by using EA scripting.
You could write a simple script (there are lots of examples on the website) which prints Activities but examines the status value first.
Another way would be to just print a hyperlinks for the activities, then, in a separate Element Report (e.g. in an Appendix) print only the Activities with the relevant status. So the interesting activities would have ‘live’ hyperlinks where the reader can find all their details, and the un-interesting ones just a name.

[eadocX Support]

Ha! Found it. A naughty hard-coded string.
Will be fixed in the next release – 3.6.2 – later this week.

[eadocX Support]

Fixed in next release – 3.6.2, available later this week.

[eadocX Support]

Two questions, so two answers:
1- The ‘Direction’ which eaDocX uses is the Source/Target. ‘Normal’ means ‘Source to Target’, and ‘Reverse’ means Target to Source.
EA is quite OK to have the arrow for a relationship go in the opposite direction (source->target or target->source), but we decided to use the direction of the source and target. I agree that, is you make A the source and B the target, then reverse the direction of the arrow to make it ‘target->source’, then eaDocX looks like its doing it the wrong way. But I’m afraid that’s how it is. It’s not something we can change now, otherwise 1000s of documents which users have already created will be wrong!

2 – I have just checked this, and it seems to work OK – which eaDocX version are you using ?

[eadocX Support]

There are a few ways to filter:
– create a separate Element Report, and use the filtering there
– create a report based on an EA Search, and make the Search implement the filter
– give those elements with the each status a different stereotype, then make eaDocX not print those with the stereotypes you don’t need.

[eadocX Support]

Yes.
When you are “adding attributes of a related element”, when you select a Relationship Type of ‘Information Flow’ then you get two additional attributes in the drop-down for ‘Attributes of the Relationship’.
These are:
Information Items – which prints the names of the conveyed items
Info Items – hyperlinked – which prints hyperlinks to the info items, where they are printed elsewhere in the document(this seems the most reliable technique)

[eadocX Support]

Hi Barrie,
You are quite correct that there is currently no way to copy a “section” – in your case, I think you mean a Profile for a particular EA Element type: Assumption to Constraint. That’s because for each kind of Element, EA can have slightly different information. So for any pair of element types, it’s hard to ‘copy’ the profile of one to the other, as their might be missing or extra EA attributes.
Where we can reliably do this, we do. So, for example, if you have a Profile for an element type, you can copy that profile to a stereotype of that element, because in this case we can be sure they share the same EA attributes.
As for the table captions, this question has been asked a couple of time already, but I’ll repeat the answer for completeness.
The challenge for eaDocX is simple: where does the text for the caption come from?

When eaDocX prints a table, it does that because you have defined a ‘table’ profile. So, eaDocX collects together all the EA elements of that type, and prints them in a table. But where does the caption come from? Not in any one of the elements – you might delete it, or print it in another document as ‘inline’. And not in the Profile: that may get used many times in the same document for different tables.

The way I usually avoid this problem is to:

1. Always try to have elements of the same type in a single EA Package. So I avoid packages with, say, Requirement and Use Case elements
2. Put some text into the Notes of this parent Package, which will print usually above the table of the children of the package. Nearly a table caption.

Thanks

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