Importing Content into Sparx EA

Harvesting means that you don’t have to start from an empty model. You can harvest information from previous projects, company or industry standards, and even simple organisation charts. All of this is potentially useful information, which users of the model will recognise, and which they can reference from the new bits they invent. (see the Artful Modeller posting on Psychology of Harvesting).

Harvesting Word documents

Creating a Package Structure from a Word document

Choose the EA Package where you want the imported data to go. Using eaDocX, open the Word document which contains the content you want to import and select the text you want to import, including the headings and paragraphs. Then go back to your browser package and with one click just import it directly into EA.

Any existing structure in the Word document is used to create a package structure in your EA model, with a new package created for each heading in your document.

Not only do we now have the structure, we also have the content underneath each heading which has become the content of the package Notes field, and we get more information in the package description.

This means you can quickly get a mass of semi-structured information into EA really quickly.

Adding Elements using Excel

Importing data into EA is simple with eaDocX/eaXL. Start by telling EA what to expect – so in the EA package where your data will go, create a single element type for one of the new elements that you want to create.

• Export that to Excel, including the standard EA and tagged value fields that you want to populate (e.g., Element type, name, notes, stereotype, priority).
• Add the data that you need to import as new rows in that worksheet.
• Then just import the data back into EA.

You can use this to create new elements quickly, and also to import data from other sources.

RTF Master and Model documents

If you have already tried to produce documents using the built-in EA RTF generator, then you may already have some Master documents or Model documents defined. eaDocX can use those document definitions to create eaDocX documents. So you can super-charge your existing contents with Word styles and formatting.

Simply open a new eaDocX document inside EA and then add your EA master or EA model document definition as a document section.

As with any other EA content, eaDocX will automatically give you options to format these sections precisely as you want. eaDocX looks at the elements, packages, matrices, and diagrams you have included and presents a full set of Word formatting options.

You can then add to your model document or master document content, with new eaDocX sections – all updated with a single click and delivering real insight into your model.