See here for Auto Indexing Macro
This post will discuss the indexing of symbols within a model and sorting feature available in ARIS.
If your model is looking messiy like below and you want to sort them then this article is for you.
After sorting your model will look like this:
.JPG)
ARIS Featues for sorting
Out of box, ARIS provides Arrange --> Layout / Automatic tool as shown below:
and if you apply it on IT System Inventory Model of UMG model then output will be:
In most of the cases you will get the above output atleast this happens in my version.
In the following posts we will discuss how customize macro to arrange object in the following manner
We will discuss the following type of arrangements:
1. 2D arrangement sorted by alphabets or rectangular arrangement
2. Auto Indexing based upon alphabets
3. Pyramid Arrangement
Need for Arrangement:
This will help to beautify your model and the scripts will automatically arrange objects within a model. You are most likely to feel the need for following model types:
- IT System Inventory
- Software Inventory
- Hardware Inentory
- Database Landscape
- Process Inventory
- Many many more.....
It will also help user to visually locate the desire objects within a model.
In the coming series we will explore how to achieve the above task.
Feel free to post, what other type of arrangement you are looking for....
Pyramid and 2D arrangement ....continued.....
If you can illustrate by attaching some screenshot then it would really help us to understand your requirement.
Yassine -- Adnan is referring to models serving as inventory of Systems / Software / Hardware / Process, etc. and hence you will not have the scenario of having objects within same objects in such model.
Adnan -- While I understand that these inventory models are possible, I not clear why & when you create these simple inventory models -- instead of having these objects grouped by some other characteristics (like domain, for instance) in that model? Can you throw some light..
To keep thing simple, we can always refer to UMG database.
Go to Entry Model --> IT System and open model (sorted by alphabets)
Imagine, if someone has to manually create this model and update it from time to time, just imagine the horror, if for some reason any application name is changed. then he is in really big trouble.
Nice(visually attractive) and Clean(sorted) Publisher Output:
Stakeholder generally uses publisher output to click and click and click to drill down further... It would be useful as a modeler to provide some kind of inventory of your applications/softwares/databases/servers so that they can visually locate them within a model. This model should be assigned to entry model of your organization.
Auto Indexing:
Your idea can be applied to auto-index the inventory objects based upon domain or any other attribute value. But I have commonly seen to use alphabets as indexing the inventory objects.
Shankar,
I use these quite a lot when bringing in IT objects from other source systems like a CMDB or a simple spreadsheet. I may load 100's or even 1000's of objects which are available to be used in other models but have not been used yet. If you are running Reorganize on a regular basis any objects not currenlty in a model will get deleted. It is fairly common practice to select all of the imported objects and put them in an "Inventory" model to keep them from being deleted by Reorg.
Rick
nice macro! It would be helpful to add some parameters to the marco, like:
1) maximum number of columns: if the maximum number is reached, a new row for the same letter is created. For example: If there are 8 objects starting with the letter A and the maximum is set to 5, then there are 2 rows for the letter A: the first row with 5 objects and the second row with 3 objects.
2) index starting char: if all objects are using a prefix in their name (e.g. OBJ_xxxxxxx) the prefix should be ignored when indexing the objects. In the example with the prefix "OBJ_" the indexing should start at character number 5, not 1.
3) minimum vertical and horizontal space between symbols
4) color and style of line between letters
5) additional space before and after the lines
6) style of index letter on the left side
And is it possible to publish an editable version of the macro for individual configuration?
Adnan,
I just used this maco on an Application System Type Diagram. Some apps have full names and others have accronyms in all caps. The macros seems to sort all of the capital letters in from of all of the lower case letters. For example AZZ comes before Aaa. Not a big deal as it doesn't occur all that often but thought I would pass it along.
Thanks again for all of the great macros!
Rick
Yes, you are right. The sorting is based upon what they called it "LEXICOGRAPHIC Order".
I think what you want is something like: Compares two symbols names lexicographically but ignoring case differences.
This can be achieved as well. I am working on a more generic symbol arrangement, which will be released soon.
