Missing messages for Sequence Diagram in Enterprise Architect

0
votes

We have many Sequence diagrams created inside Enterprise Architect(EA) and were displayed properly on EA earlier. Recently, not sure why, but all the sequence diagrams got corrupted and seems to have message connectors missing in them.

I have also mailed the enterprise architect support team about this and they said-

See the "Sequence Diagrams and Version Control" topic in EA's help. Please confirm that your sequence diagrams are modelled as described.

Observations-

  1. I have checked the topic suggested by support team and the Sequence Diagram are modeled properly as in the user guide with all element imstances in the same package as the diagram.
  2. I have also checked if any changes were made recently in SVN but there are none.
  3. There might be possibility that some changes were checked in directly by some of my co-worker inside database, but tracking it doesn't seems possible as the DB doesn't have history tables.

The problem is none of the Sequence Diagram now are showing message connectors. I will be writing back to support team but will appreciate if any help/pointers to solve it.

1
enterprise-architect

1 Answers

2
votes

I'm afraid I don't have any specific workaround or way out for this issue, only some general pointers.

I advise my clients against combining database repositories with external version control.

The reason is that these problems tend to crop up and in order to work around them, each team member needs a fairly high level of insight into the inner workings of the tool. I won't go into all the details, but the fundamental problem is that a connector which crosses a package-control boundary is stored in two different version-controlled files, with obvious synchronization issues.

Using EA's internal baselines instead of external version control does not entirely resolve the synchronization issues, but it does allow you to visually compare the current model against a stored baseline and, to some extent, undo changes without reverting the entire package. You can combine baselining with version control, but I haven't tried this live and I wouldn't recommend it.

If you do decide to start using baselines, I strongly recommend you also switch on user security in the "Require User Lock to Edit" mode.

Separate from both baselines and version control is auditing, which allows you to track changes in the model. I haven't used this in a live setting, and it doesn't prevent people from breaking models, but it does help you identify who did what when.

Auditing and baselines are described in the help file under Projects and Teams -- Change Management -- Tracking Changes; user security is under Projects and Teams -- Team Development -- Configure User Security.