Importing architecture Diagrams into essential

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mohineeshchandra
Posts: 10
Joined: 05 Nov 2012, 08:55

Hi ,
Can we import or upload architecture diagrams into essential instead of drawing them manually. if we can, please tell me how?


Thanks and regrads

Kurmagadda Mohineesh
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Hi,

The idea in Essential Architecture Manager is that you don't ever draw your diagrams - they are generated automatically by the Essential Viewer by querying the contents of the repository.

The only 'sort-of' exceptions to this are where we use a simple, notation agnostic, graphical models for things like the architecture dependencies. However, note that the resulting knowledge that's been captured is just the same as that captured by the more text-oriented forms - it's just the most intuitive way to capture that content.

What this means is that we can actually automatically build these graphical models. e.g. through imports from things like spreadsheets or XML. We do need structured content but this could be XMI notation from a UML-oriented modelling tool. Note that we ignore any layout information, though as it rarely has any meaning in the Essential repository.

I understand that it's possible to get things like Visio diagrams exported as Excel documents, which could then be imported.

Having said all this, the starting point for any import is semantics. What does the source content mean? Formats are fairly straight-forward but there must be a consistent structure with consistent semantics for each element (e.g, column in spreadsheet, tag in XML document).

The trick when dealing with many existing sources such as spreadsheets or even UML modelling tools, is that the semantics of each model - even if exported to a format such as XMI - varies from model to model. e.g. XMI's meta model is really about things like Classes, Attributes and Relationships, whereas in Essential we are dealing with Business Processes, Application Services and Technology Products. The names of each Class in the UML are typically things like the name of the Application or Business Process - there's nothing in the model that says this particular class with this name represents an Application and not a Business Process.

This mapping can be done fairly easily but the point is that it is specific to each source model.

We're just about to release the Essential Import Utility which provides a full environment for defining and performing the spreadsheet imports.
A new version of the Essential Import Tab was released just a couple of weeks ago and this provides a framework for importing XML source content.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
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