Printing connectors
Creating documents that start with the connections between the things in your model
When you create documents, you always start with the element, diagram or package you want to print. eaDocX then finds a Profile which tells it how to print the ‘thing’. You probably already know that the Profile can contain any of the attributes of the element/diagram/package, as well as information about related things.
But what if you don’t want to start with the ‘things’, but with the connections between the things?
This isn’t a common use case: mostly, it’s the ‘things’ we want to focus on, and connections just tell us about related things. But there are a few cases where the connections are just as interesting, and we might want to start with them.
For example, in BPMN we can create all kinds of connections between parts of a process, but there are some connections which are particularly important: the Messages. These show where one part of the business is passing control over to another, so it’s useful to be able to list these ‘handovers’. The handovers are modelled as <<MessageFlow>>Control Flow connectors in EA.
In this example, the messages which flow between the pools are really interesting.
With eaDocX you can print details of those connectors, without even printing anything about the Activities. So your document can contain a table like this:
In this example we have chosen to print:
- The name of the connector, and it’s notes
- Hyperlinks to the things at either end of the connection. The Activities themselves are documented elsewhere in the document, so the hyperlinks resolve correctly
- We have also connected each Message connector to a Message element, using the BPMN ‘messageRef’ tagged value. eaDocX has detected that these are references to other EA elements (Message1 and Message2) so has created hyperlinks for those too.
Our readers can look just at the messages, and check if they make sense.
For more details, see the eaDocX help for Diagram Connector Options
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