First off,
This is an amazing tool and very helpful in coming to grips with Archimate.
Apologies in advance if it is rude to post a feature request or if this is not the right place for feature requests.
I think two new features would be very helpful
- Merge palette items. Sometimes I find i've created a redundant node and would like to merge it with another item. Right now the task is manual and it seems like a merge should be possible. With relationships you could take the strongest relationships of both. Granted there might be issues if there were circular relationships
- Distribute horizontally / Distribute Vertically >> This feature is quite helpful in PowerPoint, whereby many blocks are spaced evenly
Anyways, easier said than done and I'm sure you have many other things to do (plus you're doing this for little or no money).
Many thanks,
Neil
Hi Neil,
welcome to the forum and thanks for your positive comments. :)
Feature requests are welcome anywhere and, although there is a formal mechanism to put them - https://github.com/archimatetool/archi/issues - I would not ignore it if recorded here.
Merge palette items - do you mean change an ArchiMate element from one type to another?
Distribute horizontally / Distribute Vertically - I think this was requested before. I'll check.
Phil
Hi,
+1 for the first one (Merge palette items). I've been wanting to create the request in GitHub more than I could say but never managed to get 5min to do it.
This should be done this way (seen from user perpective):
- User select 2 or more concepts in the navigator or current view
- He then select a (popup) menu entry to do the merge.
- If all selected concepts are similar (same ArchiMate "class" of concept) then the merge is done (see below)
And here is what is done (under the hood):
- When merge request happens, Archi first do a sanity check to be sure all selected concepts are similar (same ArchiMate "class" of concept). If not, end of the game.
- A popup windows then shows the list of concepts and ask for several informations:
- Which one do we keep as target (default to the last selected concept, alike "Match Width" and "Match Height" actions)?
- What do we do with documentation (keep only target's doc or append all docs to target's doc)?
- What do we do with properties (keep only target's ones or append all properties)?
- The merge is then done using selected options, and impacted relations (ie. relations having either source or target pointing to one of the merged concepts) are updated (now point to the "target" concept).
- View are also updated (ie. "merged" concepts now points to the "target"'s id.
I've managed to do it several time through scripts and it's both easy (logic is simple IMHO) and error prone (because of sanity checks that I almost never do in my oneoff scripts.
I'll update github issue when it will be created ;-)
JB[/list]