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Topic Title: VBA display dialog window
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Created On: 21-Jun-2006 10:53
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 21-Jun-2006 10:53
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Daniel Gallo

Posts: 1
Joined: 21-Jun-2006

I'm fairly new to System Architect, but am developing some VBA add-on components for one of my colleagues.  One of these components is a search facility to search through data on a diagram.

A list of search results are then displayed, but I want to be able to allow the user to select one of the search results and click a button to display the full details.

My question is this - in VBA how can you launch a System Architect window that will display the specified record's full details?

Hope this makes sense!

Thanks

Dan
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 8-Aug-2006 01:28
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Debi Siering

Posts: 2
Joined: 13-Apr-2006

Greetings,
I would like to use the VBA feature to create reports. Can you provide direction on customizing reports?

Thanks,
Debi
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 8-Aug-2006 02:35
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Duane Hennessy

Posts: 112
Joined: 18-May-2006

There seems to be two subjects to your question:

1. How can you launch a System Architect window?
2. How can you display a specified record's full details?

If you are talking about a VBA window within System Architect then the code is as follows:

Load MyFormName
MyFormName.Show


These are modal windows so the user will not be able to click around on the diagram whilst they are open.

If you are asking how to launch an inbuilt System Architect window or SA dialog then these can be found under the ISAimf object within your Object Browser. You call functions such as:

SAGenerateDialogsToFile
or
CloseDisplayWindow

If you are asking how to display the record's full details then you can use a textfield within the dialog and extract the details via ADODB or some iterative approach through the object model of a diagram.

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 9-Aug-2006 02:19
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Debi Siering

Posts: 2
Joined: 13-Apr-2006

Thank you for replying. Attempting to create Word templates using VBA. When you do not see a particular type of word report that you would like to generate from the tools drop down menu. For example if you created a report using Explorer Relationship Report you would then create a word template that would extract the selected diagram in a deliverable format. (currently coping & pasting the diagram). Would you use VBA to do this or some other method to create a word document?

Thanks,
Debi
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 9-Aug-2006 07:13
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Duane Hennessy

Posts: 112
Joined: 18-May-2006

Hi Debi,

All of our Word reports are custom built using VBA. We are moving beyond this though.

The first reports created by previous System Architect developers were reliant upon the SA object model and walking through components to extract information. We changed this by using ADODB recordsets to extract the information directly from the database (SQL Server) and write out our data within either Word or Excel.

We are now gearing up to use WordprocessingML and SpreadsheetML (see: http://rep.oio.dk/Microsoft.com/officeschemas/wordprocessingml_article.htm
and
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/07/05/435772.aspx

Plus a search upon his site for the rest of the articles.
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/search.aspx?q=wordprocessingml&p=2

These work for Office 2003 and upwards. They remove the reliance upon Office object models and provide granular control over the entirety of produced documents.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you need any help with your reporting requirements

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 17-Aug-2006 13:05
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Matt Sheranko

Posts: 82
Joined: 7-Oct-2005

Duane (and other heavy hitters!),

Bypassing the SA API/Object Model and going straight to the Database seems somewhat risky...or at least I assumed this initially.  Other than this forum (and object browsing in VBE) there appears to be very limited documented solutions or help.  Support will not provide VBA help.

I have recently been using VBA to access the SA application using the Telelogic provided User Guide and VBA Extensibility Guide.  There are very limited examples here and no where to go when I discover inconsistencies.

Maybe completely understanding the SA created database schema is a better option.  Data is data...

Questions:

1) how often has the database schema changed significantly?
2) why did your team choose direct access to the database vs. the SA object model/API?
3)  What are our options for back end access?  VBA to the SA Object Model, Direct read write to the Database?

Thanks for any input in this area.  We are currently investigating to standardize on a "back end" interface to SA for initial creation of DoDAF architectures, batch maintenance updates and Excel/Word based reporting.



-------------------------
Thanks,

MattS
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 18-Aug-2006 04:37
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Duane Hennessy

Posts: 112
Joined: 18-May-2006

Matt,

Support is limited in terms of documentation and Googling. In fact I found the documentation not only dishevelled and the examples convoluted with irrelevant code, but I found that some of it was written so badly that they forgot the names or labels they gave properties from one page to the next. So a step by step example produced more confusion than it did help.

The database schema does not seem to have changed significantly at all. In fact we previewed the SA XT which is yet to be released and despite it being web based, the schema is exactly the same. XT is .ASP based by the way, using XML and so on (for those interested).

I chose direct access over the SA object model for the following reasons:
1. It avoided being tied to a particular language or application. This allows scope for growth into other areas, for example, Java.
2. We could achieve much faster results, in fact we reduced one report from 10 minutes to 2 to 2 and a half minutes by not iterating through the object model.
3. The object model's methods are inconsistent in the way they behave and badly documented.
4. The object model insisted that SA be open during reporting and often meant that diagrams needed to be opened on the screen to gather information. There was one way around this I found before moving to recordsets, but it was long-winded and required moving from the smallest items to the top level to gather info.

Currently we are using ADODB recordsets and 98% of the time we only read from the database. The only occasion we write is in overnight job to release definitions that remain locked at the end of the day and some tools to check in diagrams.

If another database is set up and a link provided to the Encyclopedia's database, then you can build read-only views to query and further reduce the risk of anyone writing to the database unintentionally from outside of the system.

Our move to WordprocessingML is going to produce some cool benefits. We are looking at XSLT (Transforms) to convert the data into web pages and so on. So not only are we not tied to the VBA paradigm but our reports will be available to be transformed into many structures and architectures. They can be consumed by any XSL/XML technologies. Perhaps even RSS???
It also means that our reports will be able to be consumed by later technology using XSLT's and we won't caught with a defunct VBA environment producing our documents. We are excited by the possibilities.

Edited: 18-Aug-2006 at 04:39 by Duane Hennessy
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