I have made extensive use of this feature over the years and it looks like many ither users in the community have been using it as well. It seems to be that if this import had an option to check the database for the existence of of objects rather than always creating new ones it would be even more useful. Any chance that this update might be possible?
There are two ways we have been using for data exchanging with Excel. Both of them based on ARIS Scripts.
1. Based on object’s GUID checking. This approach assumes you should have structured import from ARIS. Example of this approach is two preinstalled scripts – translation in, and translation out.
2. The second approach is to check (by script of course) objects by key field. For example you can select attribute name or processing code as a key. The minus of this method is clear – you cannot guaranty that you will get correct merging. How do we fight with that, just an example:
- We need to append information about persons’ cost rate from HR-system to ARIS organizational chart.
- As a key field we use Name of persons (in this case it could be). We create Excel file in HR-system and after that start script in ARIS, which uses information from Excel file.
- To understand results of data import we create report (by same script) which contains 3 lists:
1. List of objects which were found in ARIS (successful refresh);
2. List of objects which were not found in ARIS (new definition created in ARIS);
3. List of objects which were not found in HR-system (objects in ARIS created manually);
So using this report we can analyze results of import.
Thanks for the replies.
The functionality of the Excel data import in ARIS is almost everything I need. The ability to quickly create a bunch of objects and baisc models is great. The only downside is that sometimes the objects I want to include in the model are already loaded into ARIS. If this one smalll change was made to allow the use of existing ARIS objects in creating the models it would be great.
Rick
Rick,
VEA has developed a configurable "EA Inventory" report that does what I think you are describing:
- Allows object data export out of ARIS repository to a MS Excel spreadsheet (objects categorized/ stored by type in worksheets) for editing and updating attribute data
- Allows reimport of data with checking as to whether the object is already present in the database. If the object is not already present, it is added as new. If the object is already present, then the changed attributes are updated.
- Password protected for DB security
We also have a version of this report to import connections. It's all part of a reporting package designed to import clean EA asset data and connections, auto-generate models, and then be able to analyze your repository without tedious modeling and scripting.
We will be demonstrating these reports at the ARIS User Group meeting this Thursday at noon.
Jeff Hays
Visual Enterprise Architecture