Document Reports

The documentation engine allows you to create high quality, professional documentation that can completely replace the need to create handcrafted documents. Enterprise Architect provides an extensive set of templates that will be useful in many situations. These templates can be adjusted or new ones created to completely customize the documentation to the reporting requirements of a particular project or methodology, including cover pages and styles. The standard documentation facility helps you to report on any Package or element in the repository, and with the Virtual Documents facility you can selectively pick content from any section of the model and style and order it as you require. There is also a set of built-in reports with pre-configured content and styles that give you immediate information on specific groups of elements or properties in the model. You have the options of:

Generating one of a set of system-provided reports on specific aspects of your model
Generating a report from a system-provided template, with control of the report output through Stylesheets, add-in cover pages and tables of contents, filters and a wide range of dialog options
Creating your own templates, Stylesheets and add-in pages from which to generate reports, applying an even greater degree of control over the contents and format of the output

The document formats are common to many word processors, so you can also work on the reports in other word-processing tools to, for example, integrate the report into a larger, externally-created document.

Documentation Solutions

Feature	Detail	See also
Document Generation	The Document Generator features a powerful WYSIWYG Document editor that you can use to: Import and export document templates using XML Customize copies of the basic, system-provided templates Create entirely new templates of your own design Test templates as you design them, by generating ad-hoc reports within the designer Create and customize independent Stylesheets, Tables of Contents and Cover Sheets to apply to any of your reports It also features a documentation generator that: Provides a wide range of simple options for filtering and modifying the report output Generates detailed and comprehensive documents based on the templates Has an embedded viewer for reading the generated documents directly within Enterprise Architect A tutorial on using the Document Generator and creating document reports is available on the Sparx Systems website.	Document Templates Generate Documents Design Custom Document Templates http://www.sparxsystems.com/resources/whitepapers/
Virtual Documents	If you want to create very focused and specific documents, with a greater complexity and presenting different views of your model data, you can do so using virtual documents. For these, you set up a Report Package element and/or Model Document elements, and link Packages or model searches (for elements) into the document in whatever order or combination is most appropriate to your requirements. You can select Packages from different areas of the model, arrange them in any order, and edit or delete the Packages; the virtual document automatically incorporates the changes each time you generate it.	Virtual Documents
Word Master Documents	As an alternative to virtual documents, you can link a number of document reports into a single Word master document. This is quite possible with the current report generator but is of greater use with the original Legacy RTF Report Generator. Typically you create a Word master document, then in Enterprise Architect generate some reports that you link back into sub-sections of the master document and refresh as required during project development. In this way the project document becomes an easily-managed and feature-rich work product. You can also populate a Word document from specific sections of reports, based on bookmarks - for example, a Word document might have a section for a small part of your component model; using bookmarks you can generate a full component model, and then link into just one section of the report. This way you can maintain a complex Word document from parts of Enterprise Architect reports; the Document Generator performs one pass for one template, but using a Word master document and Enterprise Architect bookmarks you can incorporate material from several documents with different formats based on different templates. By adding tables of contents, figure tables, sections, and headers and footers, you can manage a complex document with relative ease; simply update the Enterprise Architect reports then refresh the links in MS Word.	Using MS Word Document Bookmarks

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