Managing Shared Assets using EA RAS

By Phil Chudley Dunstan Thomas Consulting

Many organisations work in multiple teams utilising shared assets for individual teams as well as global assets shared by all teams. If a single repository is used for all teams and all assets, controlling visibility and access to these assets becomes very problematic. Although not a new feature of Enterprise Architect, the Reusable Asset Service (RAS), provides a solution to managing assets for multiple teams. This presentation describes the issues with sharing assets in a single repository and the solution using a RAS. The description of the RAS will describe the infrastructure required as well as the structure and use of a RAS. The presentation will conclude with a demonstration of multiple projects using a single RAS. This demonstration will be presented using EA version 16 64 bit.

Session Recording

Questions and Answers

I have not yet setup a remote RAS so cannot test any time out problems ... but I suspect the time pout problems if any will be the same as for PCS since the RAS is accessed via PCS
It is a snapshot, if the model changes, then the contents will have to be re-registered to the RAS, if the storage has Draft status, then its contents will be overwritten, of the status is complete a new version of the storage must be created
Not as a I am aware; you could check with Nazim to see if RAS can (or is) included with his EA SaaS service
I have not yet setup a remote RAS so cannot test any time out problems ... but I suspect the time pout problems if any will be the same as for PCS since the RAS is accessed via PCS
It is a snapshot, if the model changes, then the contents will have to be re-registered to the RAS, if the storage has Draft status, then its contents will be overwritten, of the status is complete a new version of the storage must be created
Not yet, but I would assume time outs (if any) would be due to the import / export (RAS uses XMI) plus any PCS timeouts. I would only expect timeouts for very large registrations / imports. But as RAS checks all dependencies you do not need to register large sections of the repository (I only did that in the demo to shown the different options), You could register smaller "chunks" of the repository together with dependencies this may reduce the occurrence of time-outs.
I am not sure, the way I set my demo up, was to create a single SQL Server user which is set as a login to all EA repositories (the RAS and SQL Server based repositories) and PCS uses this single user to access all EA repositories. Using64 bit version 5 of PCS I used the new native connection with the single user mentioned above
Possibly, using the RAS compare differences (refer to the Sparx user guide as I did not have time to demo this), you will see a baseline comparison, then you should be able to select just the changes you want. I haven't tried this as yet, but in theory it should work.
If RAS is used to maintain the versions, so when a model is changed a new version is registered, then any version can be merged with any version. BUT if time aware modelling is used, the RAS assets will match the cloned versions. When in time aware modelling is used and an element is cloned as new version it has a new guid and hence cannot be merged with the original. For the scenarios being described it maybe be useful to create a small POC and try these scenarios out.

Speaker Bio

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Phil Chudley

Dunstan Thomas Consulting

I am a principal consultant with over 16 years’ experience of Enterprise Architect, modelling in UML, BPMN, SysML and ArchiMate 3.1 to name a few and I specialise in providing custom solutions in Enterprise Architect using MDGs and scripting.