I’m thinking about developing a mapping tool add-in for EA.
The idea is that you can manage a mapping between two types of (data) models. For example between your logical data model and your message model, or between your logical data model and your database model etc…

I already have a number of add-ins and scripts that somehow create traceability between models on element, attribute and association level, but I don’t have a tool yet to visualize and manage those traces.

To give you an idea the GUI of the thing could look similar to this:

Functions could include
– ability to add notes to each mapping
– ability to export the mapping to excel
– drag-n-drop to create mappings
– …
Now it seems to me like there could be many parties interested in such a tool.
I would like to develop this as a free and open source add-in (as I do for all my add-ins) but I’m still looking for sponsors.
My initial rough estimate for the development of such a tool is 15 man days.

I already have two parties that might be interested, but the more sponsors I can find the lower the price would get for each individual party.

So if you are interested in such a tool please let me know: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and we might be able to work something out.

The Enterprise Architect VBScript Library is an open source library of VBScripts written to be used in Enterprise Architect.

This article explains how to download, import and use the library in Enterprise Architect.

Initial Import

The Enterprise Architect VBScript Library contains some scripts to load and save scripts from/to your file system, but before we can use those we have to import an initial set of scripts to get started.

After downloading the file select menu option Project|Data Management|Import Reference Data and choose the downloaded file. Make sure to select Automation scriptsand click Import.

This will import the minimum set of scripts required to load other scripts from the file system

VBScript library initial script set

€0.00

Download library from GitHub

From the Enterprise Architect VBScript Library project page on GitHub you can either choose to download the library as a zip file, or download the repository in GitHub desktop.

Load library into Enterprise Architect

One of the scripts in the initial set is the scriptLoadScripts in the group Script Management. If you execute this script you can choose the library folder from the library downloaded from GitHub.

The script will then scan the entire folder tree and it will load any .vbs file it can find.

For starters it might be interesting to only load the Frameworks scripts as they have the most chance of being useful to anyone.

If the LoadScripts script finds a script that already exists in Enterprise Architect it will ask to overwrite the existing scripts.

In order to know in which group the script belongs it will look for a the group indicator in the script.

This will tell the script that this script should go in the group Script Management. If the script indicator is absent it will assume the group name is the name of the folder where it was found.

After loading the scripts into EA make sure to press the refresh button to make the scripts appear in the GUI.

Saving all your scripts

In the script management group there also a script to save all your scripts to the file system.

In order to control where the script should go you can add the path indicator to the script like this

The path indicator will control where to place the script relative to the chosen folder.

If the path indicator is absent the name of the script group will be used as name of the folder.

Being able to save and load the scripts from/to the file system now allows us to use version control on these scripts.

The library structure

The library is structured in two main parts.

• Projects
  Contains an assortment of various scripts written for various projects.
• Framework
  Contains the framework scripts that are meant to be used by other scripts
  
  • Utils
    Contains helper scripts and classes such as TextFile, SQL, XML etc..
  • Wrappers
    Contains the wrapper classes for EA elements such as TaggedValue, Script, ScriptGroup

The scripts in the projects folder can be used for inspiration, but it is mainly the scripts in the Framework part that are useful when writing scripts.

Using the library

The first thing you need to do when you want to use any of the framework classes is to include the framework in your script

This will include the “Include” script that takes care of including all the other scripts of the framework, including those of the Utils folder.

Then you can use the classes defined in the library. For eaxample, if you want to have the user select a directory you can use following code

The classes in the library contain both properties as operations. You can use the properties as you would expect from “real” classes.

Contributing

Have you written any VBScripts for Enterprise Architect you would like to share? If you would like to contribute to the Enterprise Architect VBScript library you can email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

This script will search the text in the comments, scenario’s and linked document of the selected elements for terms in the domain model. If it finds a match it will create a trace from your selected element to the element in the domain model.

The idea is that when we write descriptions and scenario’s we often use terms already defined in the domain model, so it would be good if we had a real trace from the element in the domain model and the element using it in its description.

But it is hard to keep the descriptions and scenario’s in sync with the traces to the domain model. This script does the hard part for us and keeps those traces in sync. All you need to do is type your description and run the script. The script will find the referenced elements in the domain model and create a trace link to it. It will also remove any automatic traces that are not valid anymore.

Next to the Name, Notes, and the Linked Document, this script will also search the scenarios, both theScenario Description, as the structured Scenario Steps. In case of a Scenario Step the script will insert to the name of the domain model element in the Uses column.

Note that the script is case sensitive. That is the reason why RoomType does not appear in the uses column. Enterprise Architect itself isn’t that picky, and it underlines Roomtype anyway because it finds a relationship to RoomType.

In order to execute the script you have to select either one or more elements in the project browser, or select a package in the project browser.

Then select Script|Link To Domain Model

Free download

Trace to Domain Model script

€0.00

The script

In the first part we ask the user to select the domain model package.
If you want to use this script on a particular model you may want to replace that by a hard coding the Domain models GUID into the script.
Since this script may run for a while on a large model, we also create an output tab so we can inform the user of our progress.

Next we create a dictionary of all classes in domain model package and all of the sub-packages recursively.

Based on this dictionary we can create one large Regular Expression that will tell us which of the terms in the dictionary are used in a certain text.

Then we check what is selected in the project browser. If the user has selected one or more elements we start process those elements. If a package is selected then we process the elements in the selected package.

Here’s the complete code for the script.