Dear Phil and Jean-Baptiste,
After using many different enterprise modelling tools, we always like to come back to Archi

We really like it simplicity and so do our customers. However, we also experience one shortcoming, that we would like to address to make this great tool even better: let’s call it “virtual views” - I am adopting this name because I’ve seen some discussion around such a feature in the past (
https://github.com/archimatetool/archi/issues/17).
Let me explain my understanding of "virtual views": currently, all views in Archi are manually layouted. Your drag-and-drop elements from the palate, positioning on the canvas and create relationships between those. You can also drag and drop elements from the model tree - Which would appear in a basic flow Lay-out including relationships. I also found some JArchi scripts to do some kind of automatic Lay-out on existing views, but this is very limited (mmbmatrix, vertical/horizontal spacing, graph layout library, etc).
What we are really looking for is a generic ability to create virtual views that are automatically update based on model contents and filtering criteria. They should offer various layout styles, such as matrix, tree, risk-map, life-cycle roadmap, etc. driven by element properties.
I’ve gone quite a way to build generic layouts with a collection of JArchi scripts. My idea is to define a separate view, mark it as “virtual “and define a set of properties to drive its layout and the filtering of elements. An example is the risk map diagram shown below, which uses the properties “impact” and “probability” to position assessment elements on a grid. The “grid” is a generic reusable and stackable layout container.
This is great, however one shortcoming is of course that people could unintentionally modify the virtual views, since they are just standard Archi views and in no way protected against direct modification.
Another issue is the ease of access: I envisage having one master script that runs through all the virtual views and updates them accordingly. However, this is a manual process which may easily be forgotten which means that the virtual views could be out of date.
Insofar, a native implementation in Archi or a plug-in might be a preferred way. However, my experience in creating Archi plug-ins is very limited and I wouldn’t really know where to start for something like that.
Before I invest much for the effort into the solution would be very much interested to align my thoughts with you regarding the virtual view feature. Maybe there is some potential for collaboration?
Cheers, Thomas