Using Multi-hop connections

This article applies to both eaDocX and eaSheets.

Enterprise Architect is all about linking things together, and using that to get a better understanding of an organization, a system or a process.

EA lets us connect things in all kinds of ways, and eaTeamWorks products allow to to visualize  – and sometime edit – all of them.

Single-hop connections

The simplest connections are directly from one ‘thing’ to another.

EA lets us do this in several ways:

1. The most obvious is via a connector. In most models, these will be the majority of connections between elements.
2. In the EA project browser, you can also see another kind of connection: parents and children. A child element can only have a single parent, so this is limiting. But things like class attributes and methods can only be children of a parent element, so these are important.
3. You can also link attributes of classes to other attributes of other classes, though this is really a special case of (1), where a connector is created, but also linked to the attributes/methods. EA calls these ‘Element Features’.
4. The notes fields of elements can contain a kind of hyperlink to another element, diagram or folder, but this is a fragile way to link elements together, and whilst eaDocX will convert these into hyperlinks in your documents, we don’t recommend using this approach in your models.
5. You can also create tagged values which can be made to connect to another element or other EA ‘thing’. Some modeling languages – like BPMN – use this a lot, and eaDocX will automatically create hyperlinks in your documents if it finds connections like these.

Multi-hop Connections

Both eaDocX and eaSheets also understand the idea of multi-hop connections. That is, where element A is connected to B, and B connected to C, they will let you see that A and C are kind-of connected.

This is a really powerful idea in modeling, so it’s important that you can visualize connections like these. You can’t edit such connections in eaSheets (as you can do with single-hop connections) because they are too complicated.