A new feature: dynamic custom profile view

[Marbi]

Dear all,
Firstly, many thanks to all who have contributed to the emergence and development of the Archi modeler. It's a really a good job.

I have been  using  Archi for several years and I must admit,  that  comparing it with other tools, I like it more and more. But the appetite grows with eating.

I have a few suggestions of some new features. Given that I am no longer an active programmer, I apologize in advance that I can not present a working solution proposal, but we have so many talented programmers on board...

The first proposal is as follows.

Let's  introduce a new type of template mechanism and let's call it "dynamic custom profile".
This template is built as a new view type  - a profile type view.
At the profile view, we can place all the ArchiMate objects and relationships of choice. The objects and relationships are parameterized by the sets of properties. The profile view itself is  also parameterized by the property set,  as we already do it for the report generation  purpose, for example. In this way, we can predefine text positioning, fonts, colors,  lines thickness,   etc.
The profile view  prepared in such  a way can be stored  as a so-called "dynamic custom profile" either internally in the model,  or as an external template file, which can be imported into any new model within a given instance of  Archi, and can be maintained exactly the same way as the  model templates.
It can be many of such profiles within a single model. Of course, you can choose a "generic" or "empty"  profile, which could be equivalent to the lack of any custom profile.
During the construction of the model, we can choose any custom profile defined within the model or available within the Archi instance.
After choosing a particular profile, all newly created diagrams, objects and relationships that we put on the regular ArchiMate views, are created with the properties that have been defined before, upon the given profile. Changing the profile,  we change the properties sets only for the elements we are going to create. All the elements already created maintain their properties set according to the profile were created upon.
The second proposal concerns the introduction of a special type of property value: name auto generator, generated  according to a predefined pattern, for example, "<text prefix><generated next number><text suffixe>.

Implementing these features will significantly increase the range of usability of the Archi modeler and it seems that the workload is not so big.

Regards,

Marbico.

[Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie]

Hi,

Regarding the first proposal, that's almost exactly what I have in mind for a future viewpoint manager! (@Phil  )

I don't really understand the second proposal :-(

Regards,

JB