eaDocx 3.5 has been officially released, introducing the ability to save Word documents as an HTML file with a new HTML generator.
This version also includes a number of re-factoring and internal improvements so that future features can be implemened.
Since Enterprise Architect already has an HTML report feature, one may wonder why eaDocX includes its own HTML generator.
- The EA HTML Generator creates a forest of tiny HTML files, in a deep hierarchy of nested packages. This is hard to save in tools like SharePoint, and cumbersome to move around. But it does deliver a really useful feature: the ability to click on items in diagrams, and jump straight to the item in the HTML document.
Another great feature of the EA HTML generator is that it delivers a really neat 'Table of Contents', which gives the reader a quick way to navigate around the document, with something which looks just like the EA Project Browser. It would be great if eaDocX delivered an equivalent ;-)
In order to make an HTML document look good, it also requires knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which whilst they are not hard, are just one more thing to learn.
- Saving a Word document 'as HTML' also works, but produces a file which has a CSS at the start which is huge, and won't work in some browsers, but also has lost all knowledge of source of the data in your EA model.
eaDocX HTML re-generates your document from scratch, starting with an empty file, so HTML documents must have 100% EA content. Extras have been added to eaDocX to make this look better, such as embedding images from the EA Image Library, and selecting overrides to make title pages look smart.
Other Improvements for v3.5:
- Document Management improved, to make it easier to disable it temporarily for a document, and an 'Advanced' tab on the Document Details form to join-up documents and their EA elements, if they become separated .
- 'Image' is now an attribute for 'DocumentInformation' sections, so you can embed images from the EA Image Library into your HTML document. Doesn't currently put images into Word documents.
- Diagram Filters makes it possible to either supress particular diagram types, or print certain diagram types in a different way e.g. with 'Diagram & Contents'.
- Floating Licence diagnostics. V3.4 had some issues with eaDocX not returning the correct error when the eaDocX client can't connect to the LSA. Correct error is now returned.
- Help has been reviewed in many places, especially to show which settings should be changed to implement non-English languages.
- Fixed errors in eaXL, where Unicode characters were not saved correctly, and where EA adds the Tagged Value Enum values into the Tagged Value.Notes field.
- Support for editing of HTML Notes fields in Excel (eaXL module)
- Limited support for the PostgreSQL DBMS. It is said limited as the EA interface to this DBMS seems to be different from other DBMSs, which is still being investigated.