Gerben ELement names and view presentation

Started by objective1, March 04, 2015, 13:24:50 PM

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objective1

I poked around the forums a little about 'multi line element names'

Having lived in the content management world for quite a while  what i see in the discussions appears to be exactly a content management problem.

1. The element name is canonical and needs to be the core attribute of the element.  as such  when a modeler wants a view with only that, or when the core definition of an element is necessary the modeling tool should support that objective. (current state)

2. In order to make the views/models more consumable, there are some conventions that would be helpful. Gerben has indicated these in his book.  Those would be new features in the modeling tool, not necessarily forcing them into the language or for that matter onto the modeler.

so...   I would see the concept laying out as the following feature request (doing this on the fly so i'm sure lots of discussion will ensue)

- provide an option for a modeling element to add a line of text before the name and after the name.
- the text is maintained with the element, but it is merely meta data and not necessarily core to the model itself
- the visibility of the line(s) can be managed by the modeler and would apply to all views. (i don't see a simple way to consider doing this by view) i.e., a modeler can make a line visible or not.

thoughts?


Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie

In fact, this raises several questions or remarks:

Quoteprovide an option for a modeling element to add a line of text before the name and after the name.

Why one line before and after ?
A more general solution would be add a "label" field expressed using some kind of macros providing access to element name and properties (in the following I assume that "{something}" means "the value of something") and supporting new lines. By default, label would be "{name}" which is current situation, but could be replaced with either a fully hardcodded label like (\n stands for newline): "[app name]\nservice name\n[Application Service]"
Or even better: "[app name]\n{name}\n{type}" (where "{type}" whould be expanded to the ArchiMate element type).

Quotethe visibility of the line(s) can be managed by the modeler and would apply to all views. (i don't see a simple way to consider doing this by view) i.e., a modeler can make a line visible or not.

Here is the tough point. Does this have to be done globally (apply to all views) or not ? Does the default label have to be customizable at least per Archimate element type ? Could we decide on a per view basis that we don't want to use label but name instead ?...

A lot of questions but an interresting feature, already discussed but never finished. Here are some links on that topic:

JB
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