Making a package ‘managed’

Making a package ‘managed’ (my Model Expert) just tags a package with the identity of the Reference Model (RM) which should be used to validate it.

Specifically linking a package and its RM makes it easier to re-check the model, and makes the experience of validating it in a sheet a bit simpler.

To manage a package:

1. Select the package in the EA Project Browser
2. Right click and choose Specialize/Model Expert/Manage package.
3. Choose the RM to want to use to manage this package.

You can also specify further details on HOW you want Model Expert to manage the package:

1. Whether you want strict or relaxed management. 
   Strict management means that Model Expert will not allow a user to break the rules in the Reference Model. This will be enforced when the user tries to add elements to a diagram, create a new element, or create connectors.
   Relaxed means that Model Expert will warn the user when they are breaking the RM rules, but let them carry on. This is useful when, for example, you have a draft RM which you are still planing to expand, or when you have an expert user who doesn’t nee to have the RM rules enforced.
2. For each type of element in the RM, you can choose which package(s) the user can choose element from.
   For example, you might not want users to create new Actor elements, because to do so is an important decision. So you can specify that they can only use Actors from a specific package.
   This is really useful to stop modelers from accidentally creating new elements with the same name as an existing one, and so creating duplicates which need to be resolved later. We call this the ‘Context‘ of the element type for this package.
3. You can also say which existing diagrams in the package (if any have already been created) are examples of which diagram type in the RM. This is useful when managing a package where some modeling has already happened.

All this means that you can apply the same RM to different packages in different ways. So one modeling team might only be able to choose their Actors from a specific package, but a different team can be constrained to choose ones from a different one.