Posts

The three free and open source add-ins for Enterprise Architect : EA Navigator, EA-Matic and ECDM Message Composer have been combined in a convenient package called Bellekens EA Toolpack.

Bellekens EA Toolpack

Downloading any of the add-ins from the site now gets you an installer for the Bellekens EA Toolpack. With this installer you can install all three add-ins, or only the ones you require.

Bellekens EA Toolpack installer

The main reason for this change is the shared EA Addin Framework. Because all three add-ins use the same framework, there was a risk at version conflicts when two add-ins were installed on the same machine because each add-in installed its own version of the framework.… Read more

With EA Navigator version 2.4.12.0 you can now navigate from and to composite diagrams of an element.

Recently I’ve been working a lot with BPMN models. BPMN models make extensive use of the composite diagram mechanism in EA to drill-down on the processes and sub-processes.

In a classical UML model we usually place the composite diagram under the element, in which case finding the composite diagram, or finding the element(s) that have a diagram as composite diagram, is trivial. They are at the same location in the project browser.… Read more

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.… Read more

I’ll be presenting two sessions soon at the EA User Group Seminar.

Below the full agenda of the event. For more details and booking visit http://eausergroup.com/

Enterprise Architect

Agenda – Wednesday 15th May 2013


The event tracks are;

  • Track 1 – Setting up projects for success with EA
  • Track 2 – Project Delivery with EA
  • Track 3 – Implementation & lessons learnt

The agenda for the day will be as follows;

Dunstan Thomas

09:00 – 09:45

  • Exhibition, Coffee & Welcome

09:45 – 10:30

  • Keynote – Modelling Software Intensive Systems with Doug Rosenberg

10:30 – 10:45

  • RefreshmentsLieberLieber

10:45 – 11:30

  • Track 1 – Writing Use Cases in EA with Ian Mitchell.
Read more

The focus of version 2.3 of the EA Navigator is usability.

As a user myself I’m in a good position to evaluate the user-experience of the tool, and I felt the EA Navigator was coming short on that aspect. So I decided to do something about that.

One of the most important improvements, and also the most difficult one, is the switch to background processing.

With all the new features in the latest version I (and other users too) noticed that the EA Navigator was seriously slowing down EA itself.… Read more

Since the release of version 2.1 the EA Navigator has been quite stable. Not much need for major improvements or bugfixes.

So version 2.2 has been about little changes and updates.

The most remarkable new feature is the new context menu with the ability to open the properties dialog of an element. Not remarkable because of the feature itself, but because of the loops and holes I had to jump through to get that part working. Opening the properties dialog is not really a supported API function of EA, so I had to resort to using an undocumented CustomCommand function to hack my way into it.… Read more

I’m proud to announce that the EA Navigator has made the “official” Sparx Systems 3rd party add-in list.

Sparx Systems doesn’t just publish any add-in for Enterprise Architect. Each add-in on the list has been demonstrated to the the people of Sparx, and only if they approve it it will be added to the list.

So a couple of week ago I had an appointment to do a web conference with Sparx to do a little demo of my add-in.… Read more

With the current release 2.1 the EA Navigator has now matured into a real product that will make the life of any Enterprise Architect user a lot easier.
I can know, as it’s primary user I use it constantly during my daily modelling tasks, and I can assure you that it has already saved me heaps of time.

And because any real product should have a logo, so I proudly present to you: The EA navigator logo.

After the complete re-factoring  of version 2.0 version 2.1 has been more about polishing and refining.… Read more

One of my hobbies is working on my own open source project, the EA Navigator, an add-in for Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect.

In the release 2.0 I added a graphical user interface as a docked window in EA to make it more user friendly to navigate.
The selected element is put into a treeview with each menu option as a subnode.

Getting the navigation options this way is indeed a lot easier then having to right click, and select the correct menu option.… Read more

Attention! A more recent version of the EA Navigator is currently available.
See EA Navigator Downloads

I’ve just released the first “major” upgrade to the EA Navigator add in.

In this release no additional features have been added, the only thing that was changed is that the EA Navigator will now use a docked window in EA to navigate between the different elements.

Now instead of having to right-click and choose an option from the Extensions|Navigate context menu, the Navigator window will immediately show the options for the currently selected element.… Read more

Pages

The Bellekens Enterprise Architect Toolpack contains all the free and open source add-ins offered by Bellekens.

General purpose add-ins

Specialized add-ins

All add-ins in this package are open source using the BSD-2 license

Download

Prerequisites

The Bellekens EA Toolpack requires .Net framework 4.5 which is already installed on most Windows installations.

Installation

When installing you can choose which of the tools you wish to install.… Read more

The EA Navigator is a free and open-source (BSD License) add-in for Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect that makes the life of any Enterprise Architect user a lot easier.

It allows for quick navigation between different elements in a model, especially between those elements that are not easily found using the standard EA features.

Using the dockable add-in window it retains a history of the 50 last selected model elements, and shows the important related elements at a glance.

The EA Navigator is part of the Enterprise Architect Toolpack

It allows you to navigate between:

  • Operations and Sequence/Communication diagrams
  • Operations and their implementation (Behavior)
  • Operations and CallOperationActions
  • Types and Parameters
  • Types and Attributes
  • Tagged Values and the elements they reference
  • Elements and their owner

And to any Fully Qualified Name (FQN) or GUID that has been copied to the clipboard.… Read more