Overview |
  
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Overview |
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eaDocX allows you to create documents from your EA models.
You can choose lots of different types of EA model content and create a complete Word document fully generated from EA.
Or you can insert specific EA content directly into any Word document. This means your Word document can be a combination of hand-typed material, and the material taken directly from EA, formatted by eaDocX.
Once you have set up your documents with eaDocX, each time your EA model changes you can re-generate your document with one click, and eaDocX will pull in the latest EA model content.
All the parts of your document taken from EA are put into eaDocX Sections, and each document can have as many of them as you need. So a report might, for example, start with a cover page which has the company logo and some version information followed by an introduction, which you might choose to hand-type(1). An overview, taken from EA might accompany this, then some diagrams created in another tool, and finally another eaDocX section containing some more EA material.
In this way, your EA content can be tightly integrated into your Word document.
eaDocX will use the formatting styles from your Word document, including table styles, so the generated text will look like the rest of your document. eaDocX will also number all diagram figures, create internal hyperlinks within the document, and even automatically create a glossary. As eaDocX puts your EA content directly into MS Word documents, all the capabilities of Word are available to you
The goal of eaDocX is to make your documents more readable, allowing readers to understand what you have put into your EA model.
Some ways that eaDocX can help you do this are:
•Creating documents based on your current modeling practices
•Automatically creating hyperlinks from EA connections
•Using Excel as an advanced EA content editor, to import/export data, and to draw charts
•Adding conditional formatting rules to show where there is critical or missing data
•Including reports which cut across your EA Package structure
•and Matrix Reports showing the EA Relationship Matrix, with loads more new features
Because eaDocX documents are 100% Word documents, when they need to be reviewed your readers can make revisions and add comments to them as usual.
Then, when you receive the reviewed documents back, eaDocX collates and organizes the revisions from multiple versions, helping you update EA with any changes.
Managing interactive documents in this way, you can also retain a full audit history for the documents and the model changes.
As well as Word documents, eaDocX lets you create Excel spreadsheets and use them to edit and update your EA model. It does this with eaXL
There are many different ways in which you might create documents from EA. EA can generate
RTF documents using its built-in generator
HTML, which can be customized by altering the Cascading Style Sheets
Export to CSV file, which can be imported into a spreadsheet.
Our experience of these is that while they are suitable for producing draft documents to look at some aspects of a model, they don't produce ready-to-publish documents, which is the goal of eaDocX.
(1)In practice, just about anything you might want to put into a Word document can come from EA, which can store information in a wide variety of styles, from simple text through to very complex diagrams. As time goes on, you may find that the proportion of material which you hand-type into Word decreases, as you keep more and more in EA.