Does anyone know if there's a usable tool for generating RUP-style artifacts from a UML model in the rational toolset (i.e. Rational Software Architect, App Developer etc)?
Specifically, I need to be able to extract information from class (and potentially sequence) diagrams and create software design documents, preferably using Word (or maybe PDF).
I've tried BIRT and its just not usable. Is there anything else out there that is?
Thanks
Haven't used it for a few years but SoDA used to be the main way to generate docs with Rational tools. It wasn't free back then, not sure about now.
That's the only 'out of the box' doc generator I know of. However you should be able to use some/most of the eclipse modelling tools to roll your own by extracting model info into some intermediate format and then generating docs. So, for example, you could:
Use xtend2 to extract model info and write as restructured text files
Use sphinx to generate html or pdf from the .rst files.
hth.
There is the Rational Publishing Engine.
I'm not sure how closely this resembles either BIRT or SoDA, whether it's a rehash or a from-scratch implementation or what, but it's what's supported by IBM at the present time.
I have no first-hand experience with it, but I have a colleague who does and he seems to like it.
Related
Can anyone recommend a library who really support RTL languages such as Hebrew or arabic, and also Supports links, support images, thumbnails/in-place images, Handle large spread-sheets, set filters and page breaks and good performance – very important criteria-
I started to use PDFKit who is really good, but the language support is awful and the data that we work with cannot be manipulated, because of that we need to change the library, the price is not a problem. Someone recommended Docmosis, someone has experience with it?
Thank you very much
Docmosis has customers that have been generating RTL documents for successfully for years. Docmosis supports the image handling requirements you mention and large data sets, but has no direct spreadsheet functionality.
I suggest doing a free trial (please note I work for Docmosis) and asking their support team about specific points of interest. The cloud is the easiest way to test functionality (since you have no install or setup to do) even if you wouldn't choose to use cloud for your actual deployment.
I have designed UML diagrams in different tools (StarUML, BoUML, Papyrus, Omondo, Rational Rose, etc.) depending on the project and the date (rose was first, after Omondo, then starUMl, ..., now papyrus). However, I see that I cannot open my old UML diagrams because the tool is obsolete.
I would like to know if there is a standard format for UML diagrams. Probably not in production, but at least to know if there is proposal of standard format.
Probably, Eclipse is doing something like that with the M2 project, but do the other tools (not eclipse based) are interested in reading this format.?
Each UML tool uses its own format, but I think the era of proprietary format is over, and open format for diagrams like this should exist.
I have two answers to this:
In theory the standard exchange format for UML models is XMI but it´s true that each vendor implements a slightly different version so interchange is not a reality. Nevertheless, most tools are converging to at least support the Eclipse MDT-UML2 XMI implementation which in my opinion is becoming de facto XMI standard.
The OMG is working on a new standard : Diagram Definition that is supposed to fix the problems with the current XMI one (they are working a lot with many of the top vendors to make sure that this time they all go in the same direction) and, also important, it will allow to interchange not only the data (i.e. the info about the model elements) but also the layout and graphical representation so that after the import you get a model exactly as the same you exported in the first place
Have you heard of XMI?
#JordiCabot here adds some interesting details about it.
Besides Jordi's reference to the Diagram Definition standardization activity, please note that there is another action ongoing from OMG:
a request for comments has been issued in June 2011 for a CANONICAL XMI format, which is basically a subset and a set of additional rules for writing XMI documents that should limit the possibility of creating different XMI dialects, or at least should allow tools to understand a common dialect (the canonical one).
The project scenario:
Management, engineers, scientists and users contributes their requirements for a piece of software. They contribute gifs, jpegs, pngs, ms presentation files. They specify the sequence of occurrence.
I want to provide them with a piece of software like the movie scenario and scripting editor. (A movie scenario and scripting editor is a computer aided script writer and scenario presenter in movie production). In my case, I am not producing a movie but documenting and integrating various specifications of software UI sequences.
I need the software to sequence out the UI scenario. A scenario would be comprised by various scenes in specified sequence. A scene is a particular moment of the UI or software state.
I need the software to associate each scene to one or more files (gif/jpg/png/presentation). So that when we present it to mgmt, users, customers, we could progress through the scenario with each scene illustrated by those files.
I need the software to be able to compose sub-scenarios as a standalone project. So that each user could compose his/her own contribution to the project. Then the software should be able to specify project dependency to integrate the scenarios into one big kahuna.
Ideally, the software would generate UML sequences and empty classes.
I think, the gaming software industry might be using something of this nature.
Could anyone please suggest and discuss various software available for the purpose I have described?
Unfortunately, I don't know about any software that does what you describe - but it sounds interesting as an idea - especially with use case modeling...
If I would try to write such a tool, I would probably look at Xtext to create a DSL with editor for those scenario scripts you describe and add some code generation using the Abstract User Interface metamodel from topcased.org (curiously currently down...) modeled after UsiXML.
Good luck!
I will not be able to discuss, but I could suggest something that I think is similar. Mindomo?
I'm designing a software component which will get instructions from other components on how the UML diagram should look like, and then will produce this UML diagram in different presentation ways (in SVG, GIF, etc.), for example (in Java):
DiagramDesigner designer = new DiagramDesigner();
designer.setStyle('Use Cases')
designer.addActor('User');
designer.addUseCase('Print Document');
// etc.
String svg = designer.getSvg();
I don't want to re-invent the wheel and want to use some industry-standard language/interface for interconnection between my DiagramDesigner and other components. I'm looking for an interface similar to DOM, but for UML, not for XML.
Can anyone help? Thanks in advance.
ps. Besides the example above I would like to make my diagrams inter-operable and transferrable between servers, e.g.:
// first server
String script = designer.getScript();
// second server
DiagramDesigner desiger2 = DiagramDesigner.import(script);
So if I understand you right, you are looking for a way to work with UML on the metamodel level. You should look at the MOF standard and its implementation the EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework), which is used by almost all Eclipse based UML tools and this framework is used by many other modeling projects, it even somewhat influenced the standardization of MOF (resulting in SMOF and EMOF split) and therefore I would declare it industry standard.
Probably only loosely related but anyhow: PlantUML. It is open source, built in Java and likely contains already parts of what you want to do.
You can inspire from these scripts to generate any output you want:
http://askuml.com/
Currently examples are given in yUML because they're nice but could be anything.
At least for the syntax part, you could get some inspiration from the large set of textual UML tools (theses tools allow designers to textually specify the model and then they automatically show the model graphically using the standard UML notation).
At least of such tools here: http://modeling-languages.com/content/uml-tools#textual
I'm using an external java library for which I only have the javadocs and do not have the source code. I'd like to generate a UML diagram from the existing javadocs so that I can visualize the class hierarchy using something like Graphviz. Is that possible? Note that what I'm looking for is a graphical version of overview-tree.html.
Please let me know if you have any ideas and/or suggestions.
Thanks,
Shirley
I don't believe that there is such a tool. Most of the reverse engineer tools depend on the actual code. The javadoc information isn't guaranteed to match the code as a 1:1 for the structure, thus making it unreliable.
I'm not familiar with any off-the-shelf solution for this purpose. Most commonly folks have the source code that generated the JavaDoc.
That being said, the overview-tree.html traditionally has a fairly straightforward HTML format.
It should not be difficult to write a script that would read the file as text or as a DOM, reconstruct the hierarchy of UL and LI tags, and use that to build an input file for graphviz. I've done similar stuff in the past with other forms of data.
It's just a matter of time and proficiency with the scripting language or appropriate tools.
The one problem of this approach is that you would only get the hierarchy of classes. You would have to make it somewhat smarter if you wanted to get the "implements XYZ" and create multiple hierarchies. Even if you could get that data, you would have to manipulate GraphViz's levels to get it to provide an appropriate layout once you have this multiple inheritance structure.
Of course, adding the details of the members would turn this into a whole new problem since you will have to access other HTML files.