Enterprise Architect Customization

Value Proposition

  • Has your organization developed corporate modeling standards, maybe in another tool, and would you like to see these standards applied in EA?
  • Do you need help building complex RTF documentation generation templates?
  • Could you save a lot of time and manual labor by having a script available to run some batch updates?
  • Are the standard notations supported by EA such as UML®, SysML, BPMN™, etc. insufficient to capture the breadth and depth of your models?
These, and many other scenarios, are examples where the Enterprise Architect customization services offered by Cephas Consulting can be of value to you!
 
Extending the basic capabilities of EA has been proven to facilitate both the acceptance and the usage of the tool across roles (managers, analysts, developers, etc.) and organizations (business, development, QA, etc.). In particular the ability to have business domain concepts expressed directly in EA, using representations that non technical Users are already familiar with, greatly increases the successful use of models as key deliverables in the software development cycle.

Customization Scenarios

Documentation Generation

A common scenario is to generate RTF/Word documents in a specific format and layout, perhaps as mandated by corporate standards or as imposed by government regulations. EA provides some good out-of-the-box RTF report generation features, but creating or modifying the templates to obtain the required content can become overwhelmingly complex!

MDA Transformation Template

Clients often want to change the default transformation rules, or create new transformation sources and targets, for example to base the rules on Tagged Value properties modeled in a Profile. A similar scenario regularly occurs with code generation templates. 

Profile

You may want the tool to not only recognize your key domain concepts, for example Application, Integration, or Role, but also associate each of these concepts with pre-determined properties and perhaps default values.

Next Step

Our many years of experience in extending the base EA functionality as per our clients' specifications should make you feel comfortable in outsourcing to us the development and support of these customizations. Take advantage of this opportunity to better leverage the EA tool while your developers can remain focused on their business related tasks.

 

What Does Customization Entail?

Enterprise Architect provides many touch points where an End User may customize its out of the box behavior: MDA transformation templates, code generation templates, RTF generation templates, complex searches, scripts, etc.
 
Since all of these options for customization are built into the tool and fully supported by Sparx Systems they do not impact the ability of the User to upgrade to newer versions of EA!

Profiles

Profiles provide the option to expand the tool so that it recognizes domain (custom) specific constructs, concepts, properties and relationships. These constructs can be exported to XML, using the XMI schema, and recognized on import by other modeling tools supporting the OMG®'s model exchange format.
 
EA enables not only extending the UML® meta-model, but any of the other notations it supports!
 
Note that creating a Profile does not by itself define a custom diagram type with its associated toolbox... For that you need to create an MDG Technology.

MDG Technology

Building an MDG Technology allows you to go beyond basic Profiles by specifying related toolboxes, custom diagram types, templates (for generating code or documentation, or for transforming models), model patterns and scripts.
 
An MDG Technology, when used in conjunction with a related add-in, can further extend EA to support non standard artifacts, run batch processes, validate compliance with development processes and guidelines, automate manual tasks, and augment default traceability features, among many other options.

Customization Request Form

To inquire about pricing or other details related to customizing Enterprise Architect, tell us your requirements by completing the form below (alternatively call us at the number specified in the Contact Us page)

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