The Journal Tab

Enterprise Architect provides a great facility for maintaining a daily log of ideas, comments, notes, suggestions, events, to-do lists and other reminders of what the developers concerned with a selected element or diagram have done or intend to do for the selected object. Like the model-level personal Diary, this is a good way to keep the momentum flowing day to day. The facility is simple to use, allowing you to quickly jot down your thoughts as they occur to you.

The 'Journal' tab is part of the Discuss & Review window, and allows you to record points as you work on, review and discuss the element or diagram with other team members.

Access

Creating a 'Journal' entry

If you are the first to access the 'Journal' for an element or diagram, it has the single entry 'Today' in the 'Date' column. You can type freely in the 'Journal' column against 'Today', including carriage returns and text formatting. Editing a Journal entry is in most cases the same as entering formatted text into the Notes window, with many options to mark up text, create hyperlinks, use the glossary and similar. Some features, such as the Translation features for Notes are not currently supported in the Journal window.

When you have finished typing your comments, click away from the Journal window and your text will be automatically saved as the editing window loses focus.

You can return to the Journal at any time (as long as another user is not actively updating it) and:

• (Right-clicking on the 'Date' column) Refresh the Journal with any text that another user might have just added
• Add further notes; you and other team members use the same Journal entry to record notes and comments on the element or diagram throughout the day
• Edit the existing text, including reformatting
• Delete text or complete notes; select the text and click on the Delete key or use the 'Delete' context menu option

Journal Entries Each Day

Every day, when you open Enterprise Architect and review the 'Journal' for an element or diagram, it has a 'Today' item at the top, against which you record the day's Journal entries on the selected object. Beneath the 'Today' item are the entries for previous days, identified by the date on which they were made. These only include dates on which an entry was made; there are no blank lines for days on which no entries were made.

As you build up a number of Journal items on an element, you can set the number of items to display (effectively the number of days on which items were posted) in chronological order, starting with today. To do this:

1. Click on the Hamburger icon at the top of the tab and select the 'Show This Many Entries' option.
2. On the submenu, click on the number of days for which to show comments - 1 (Today), 3, 7, 15, 30 or All (every item posted on this object).

You can also pin the currently listed comments for an element or diagram to the tab. Those comments show in the tab regardless of which other object you are working on, which is a useful way of showing instructions written to guide your work on other objects. To pin the comments:

1. Click on the Hamburger icon at the top of the tab and select the 'Pin this comment' option.
2. When you want to display comments for other elements or diagrams, click on the Hamburger icon again and select the 'Unpin Comment' option.

Additionally, you can set the 'Journal' tab and the Discuss and Review window as defaults so that they are displayed each time you log back in for a new work session. To do this, click on the 'Hamburger' icon and select the 'Set this Tab as Default' option.

As well as formatting and editing today's entry, you can edit the entries for previous days. This means you can remove information that is no longer relevant (such as old reminders) or things that were listed to be achieved that are now complete. On the other hand, you can also highlight entries that are still significant, and refer back to them from the 'Today' entry.