EA Navigator 2.4 released

The main new feature of the version 2.4 of the EA Navigator is the Quicksearch. The Quicksearch feature is undoubtedly the fastest way to find anything in a (large) EA model. It is the type of feature which makes you wonder how you could live without it all that time before.

Developing the Quicksearch function was far from easy. I wanted something that resembles what Google does when you start typing, and I started things with a standard Windows Forms ComboBox. But after a while tinkering I finally had to give up and I started my own user control from scratch, combining a TextBox and a ListBox.

Furthermore the EA Navigator now no longer a strictly read-only add-in. With the feature to add an element to a diagram it now is able to make changes to a model for the first time.

Ad last but not least a lot of painfully boring work went into adding all the icons. The EA Navigator now uses more then 90 different icons in its tree.

What’s new in EA Navigator 2.4

Here are the changes for version 2.4.

Quicksearch

The Quicksearch feature is the new textbox on the top right of the EA Navigator window.

Start typing in the Quicksearch box and you will get a list of all things in the model who’s name start with whatever you have typed.

Hovering an item in the dropdown list will show you it’s fully qualified name in the tooltip.

Selecting an item will select it in the EA Navigator tree.

The Quicksearch also comes with a whole bunch of new options

You can choose which types of items to search for, and with the Actions you can choose what to do when an item from the Quicksearch is selected.

Link to Element Feature navigation.

EA has the possibility to define links between features of an element such as Attributes or Operations using the Connect to Element Feature feature, which is very useful in a lot of situations.

Visually EA shows which feature is linked using brackets next to the connected Attribute or Operation.

The is all nice and dandy, but the downside of the story is that you can only see which features are linked by looking at the diagram.

Now with the EA Navigator you can simply navigate from one feature to the other

Add to Diagram

The add to diagram button will add the selected element in the EA Navigator tree to the currently opened diagram.

The element will be added to the top left corner of the diagram.

Navigate to GUID

A new button has been added that allows you to navigate to a GUID of an item in EA.

Each item, elements, attributes, operations, diagrams, etc… has a unique id in the form of a GUID (example: {C06EF618-D57C-4f63-BF64-F5A5265694AE}).

Pressing the Navigate to GUID button will allow you to go to that element using it’s GUID. If there’s already a GUID in your windows clipboard then the EA Navigator will use that one. If not the EA navigator will show a dialog where you can past (or type) the GUID.

For elements shown in the project browser you can easily copy the GUID to your clipboard using the context menu Copy Reference|Copy Node GUID to Clipboard

New Icons

The EA Navigator now shows correct icons for all possible element types in EA allowing you to easily see the difference between Use cases, Classes, Activities, etc..

The icons had become even more more important because of the Quicksearch function. When searching for an element it is especially useful to immediately which type it is.

Over 70 new icons has been added bringing the total number of icons used by the EA Navigator to 92.

Downloads

• Windows Installer
• Source Code

More Information

More information about the EA Navigator add-in for Enterprise Architect can be found here:

•  EA Navigator