archimatetool / archi

Archi: ArchiMate Modelling Tool
https://www.archimatetool.com
MIT License
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Functionality for inserting multiple elements #672

Open timolaine opened 4 years ago

timolaine commented 4 years ago

These days Archi is a very capable tool and I want to thank everyone involved in its development. It has a very good balance of features and simplicity.

One thing that could be improved however is the workflow of inserting many elements at once. The CSV imports, even when you are used to doing them, always seem to take a lot of time. If you have a list of (say) application components, or a table with application components in column A with the rest of the columns specifying the attributes of the applications, it is always a lot of work to get the import to go through without errors.

BiZZdesign has a pretty good solution for this in their Insert multiple functionality. Basically you specify the type of element you have in your list or table, optionally specify some attributes, and then cut and paste from (say) Excel or any other application. I would absolutely love to see something similar in Archi.

This would be particularly great for example for organizations that are just starting out with EA. Often they already have lists and tables of departments, vendors, services, processes, applications, servers and so forth. It would make the first steps with EA and Archi a lot easier if we could just cut and paste simple lists and tables without needing to learn the complexities of the CSV import.