Editing Connectors

With eaXL V4, you can now edit, create and delete connectors.

These can be done within the context of a diagram or independently - See Adding Relationships

To edit the connectors in a single diagram.

From the EA context menu for a Diagram, choose menu, choose Specialize / eaXL / Open in Excel / Diagram connectors

From here you can:

Choose which fields of the connector to display, including tagged values of the connector

Edit those fields

oFor 'Direction' , values are as displayed in EA: "Source -> Destination", "Destination -> Source", "Unspecified"

oSetting 'Stereotype' or 'StereotypeEX' to BLANK is an known issue! It jst doesn't seem to work, due to EA somehow re-setting the values

Add new connectors, but only to Elements already in the diagram. Elements are chosen using only their NAME attribute, so beware of diagrams with elements of the same name.

Delete connectors. Just type 'Delete' (must be EXACTLY this string - initial capital letter) in the ConnectorType column

See also editing attribute 'element feature' links

Notes on Creating Connectors

Connectors in EA are complicated, and using the EA API - as eaXL does - means that not all kinds of connector can be created perfectly. (see forum article) So please look carefully a the connectors you create using eaXL. Simple associations, dependency and realization links seem to create OK - more complex ones, with interesting directions and sub-types are harder (see forum article from 2007 !)

We will continue to research connector creation, and will be making improvements in future releases, once we understand how to work around the EA API restrictions.