Glad to hear that that resolved the issue. There are, within the Viewer itself some help pages that explain how a particular view works. We don't have help pages for all the views and the set of views continues to grow. If you do run into an issue like this again, it's worth having a look in the Vie...

If you haven't already, make sure to set the "root" business capability in the repository, so that this view knows where to start. In the repository, in the Essential Viewer section of EA Support, there's a class called 'Report_Constant'. Make sure that you've set a value for the constant ...

Thanks for posting back with the solution.

We'd be really interested to know which version of Java didn't work and which version you ended up using.

Thanks again

Jonathan

Thanks for this,

Just to make sure - have you associated this Synonym instance with the relevant Report instance by adding this Synonym instance with the 'synonym' slot of the relevant Report instance?

Jonathan

Hi Victor, Do you have a firewall between your Protege server and your Protege client? If, so there are some settings in the run_protege_server.bat that you can enable to specify the selected port for both the Protege Server and the Java RMI registry (used by the client to connect to the server). Th...

Hi Victor, Is your RHEL Linux providing you with a graphical user interface? These parameters must be set as part of the Protege project file (PPRJ) and normally that is via the Project->Convert Project... menu option in the GUI From what you've posted it looks like you need to provide the correct l...

Hi Patrick, To configure the Import Utility to access the target repository, running as a 'Server-based' repository, you should be supplying the login credentials for accessing that Protege server and project. The hostname should be the hostname on which your Protege server is running, and your user...

The correct details are saved in the PPRJ file itself once you’ve converted your project from Protege Files to Protege Database.
As part of that convert process, you specify the JDBC connection details as described in this help file:

How to configure a database-backed repository

Jonathan

The status of those products is controlled by the value of the status element (slot) on a Technology Product Role - e.g. Apache Tomcat 7 as Java Servlet Engine (<technology product> as <technology component>) Setting the value of the status slot to something like "Production" will cause th...

Thanks Miles Installing outside of the C: drive and Program Files is certainly a good approach. All of the components are Java based (with the exception of GraphViz) and are happy to be installed wherever you want. The installer itself attempts to gain elevated status to enable it to write to folder...

When I have time I will try and complete a no-admin install on my work machine for all of Essential EA and will report back. Thanks, that would be great. We've tried hard to manage everything on a single, cross-platform code-base - including the installer, but recent versions of Windows seem to mak...

A quick follow up on this one.

Please note that if you are installing Protege as part of Essential Architecture Manager, Protege 4.3 is NOT a supported version. Please use Protege 3.5 (a peer of / different direction compared the 4.x series of Protege.

Jonathan

You can programmatically set the colour and icon for each milestone, using the 'color' and 'icon' attributes of the 'event' object in the JSON that drives the timeline. There is a red milestone diamond icon in the js/timeline_js/images folder that you could use to set the icon. You can also set the ...

This View Template seems to assume that there would only ever be one Application Roadmap (rightly or wrongly). This is something that is being reworked for the next release. In the short term, you have some options around how you name the roadmaps etc. but the simplest may be to hard code the name o...

Many of the summary views are being reworked for the forthcoming version 5 but this layout is not a bug, it's the original design.

If you want to change this layout, you are of course free to do so by editing the View Template: common/core_strategic_plans.xsl.

Jonathan

Hi,

This is most likely due to the '/' issue that we have encountered with Tomcat 8. Please see this post here, which explains how to resolve it.

Jonathan

We've recently encountered an issue with PlantUML and GraphViz on OS X Yosemite where when a View uses PlantUML (e.g. Business Process Flow), an exception is raised: net.sourceforge.plantuml.svek.EmptySvgException The exception is caused by an incomplete installation of GraphViz, in particular the '...

Hi, The lines show the transitions between each milestone and are defined by the Strategic Plans that are associated with the transition arc on the roadmap diagram. Double-click on a transition or select it and click on the spy-glass button to open the transition object. Once you've done that, you c...

Good points. Thanks Colin

Jonathan

I think this is a duplicate.

We'll continue this thread here.

Jonathan

Hi Craig, We don’t have a specific tutorial for the Technology Roadmap, sorry. The out-of-the-box view needs a couple of things to make it work - and provides the ‘Technology perspective’ on a roadmap - e.g. an enterprise roadmap. 1. Define your roadmap. If you’re interested only in the technology t...

Hi Jonathan, Thanks for the clarification. Is it possible to show the parent capability always in the first row of the table? Users are finding it quite confusing. It would be helpful to visually set up the parent capability differently from the child capabilities. Thanks Hi, That sort of thing is ...

Thanks for your post. Let me answer with some more questions: - Have you installed all the Essential software on the same server? - Protege server - Tomcat with Essential Viewer - Tomcat with Essential Import Utility What the Import Utility is attempting to do here is to connect to your multi-user i...

The Essential Baseline Repository is a Protege project that contains an empty, starting-point repository for the Essential toolset. All of the classes of the Essential Meta Model are defined along with some reference ‘instances’ but otherwise, you can think of this as a blank repository, ready for y...

Thanks for your post. The categories that you have described sound like risks and as such, you could capture them as instances of the Risk class. You can capture the details of a Risk and then relate it to any elements in the repository to which that Risk affects - via the ‘Related Business Elements...

You can add this by extending the Application Provider Summary View, the source for which you'll find in the Viewer web app folder: application/core_al_app_provider_summary.xsl In there, you will find a div with the id = sectionSupplier. This is the panel in which the Supplier name is rendered. In h...

We have been given the ZK open source license for the ZK/EE, which is applicable for GPL open source projects, like The Essential Project.

The warning is a bug in the ZK package and you don't need to down-grade to the CE version to use the Import Utility

Jonathan

Hi Jay, The answer is to add a '/' to some configuration settings in web.xml as follows: In the servlet definition for the EssentialReportService - (servlet-name = reportService), add the '/' to each of the param-values in the init-params to look like: <init-param> <param-name>outputReportFile</para...

To publish to the Viewer, only the first part of the URL is correct. All other parameters in that URL will be ignored and should not be used in the "Essential Viewer" field.

All that's required is http://<HOSTNAME>:<PORT>/essential_viewer

Jonathan

Just a quick update on this issue.

We have replicated it, identified the problem and can confirm that this can be resolved by configuration of the web.xml file and essentialCache.xml

Jonathan

The data should be persistent in Essential Viewer. A snapshot of your repository is saved as an XML document in the Viewer web application. If JBoss is re-deploying Essential Viewer on start up, then that will reset the repository XML snapshot. Normally, e.g. on Tomcat, once the application is deplo...

Hi Morag.

Your Tomcat (or other) application server must be running on port 8080 with Essential Viewer deployed to it.

Have you started your Tomcat service?

Jonathan

This view requires a number of elements of the repository to be completed. For each capability, it will need at least one Business Process defined and for those, a Physical Process (so that we know who is performing it). To understand the change that is going on, it looks for the all the strategic p...

Thanks Colin!

Jonathan

Yes, indeed that can be done with the existing meta model. I'm not sure we have out-of-the-box views that 100% do what you're asking but the Project Summary views show which areas of the Business Capability Model are impacted by that Project. We have certainly done extended views to include project ...

Thanks for your post. If you are moving the repository between environments, the Protege files export format in the Snapshot Tab would be the best format. This will produce the 3 files (pprj, pins, pont) that hold the repository. You can then move these, e.g. from test to production, by moving the f...

Hi, Do you mean that in the table column 'Business Capability' you are seeing the selected Business Capability instance. e.g. On the summary of "My Capability 1", you see "My Capability 1" in a row of the "Supporting Capabilities and Processes" table? This is because we...

This posting describing how to define the logical technology on which an Application Provider depends describes what the view is looking for

Defining the Logical Technology Platform for an Application Provider

Jonathan

You are quite right that that view should have a better error message! This particular view is trying to show the set of logical Technology Components that have been defined as supporting the selected application. These are brought together in what we call a Logical Technology Component Architecture...

Thanks for the post, Pascal. I don’t think any of our out of the box views provide exactly what you are looking for. However, the idea with Essential Viewer in particular is that this is a platform on which you can quickly put together the view that meets your needs, using the 100+ out of the box vi...

Hi Pascal. Thanks for the post. We have done a number of different renderings of the Business Capability model for our clients, mostly based on a graphical rendering of the overall Business Capability Model - similar to the current out of the box but with an improved Capability and sub-capabilities ...

Thanks for posting the solution that you found.

Great to hear - and do let us know how you get on from here.

Jonathan

It sounds to me like we have two slightly different situations here. Bien is getting no response from Essential Viewer either in the Web Browser or the Essential Viewer tab (in Protege) on http://localhost:8080/essential_viewer However, Julian is seeing a response in the web browser on http://localh...

Hi Paul, Thanks for all the information. Let me start by playing back my understanding of where you're at. You've set up the project to use the database back end and turned on the Collaborative Protege capabilities, which has created the Annotations project. All this is working fine in 'standalone' ...

Thanks for the details of the log. The warning messages can be ignored - in fact you can resolve them by removing the Annotations project definition on your Project in the meta project. Unless of course, you are using the annotations project / Collaborative Protege, in which case check the full path...

The latest version of the software is currently version 4.3.1, and there have been a number of fixes and improvements to the views since version 3.0.4 If you download the latest installer and select the Essential Viewer package, this will deploy the web application to your chosen application server,...

Hi Kelly, It seems that there may be a bug in that version of the installer system on Linux - that causes both that error message about the resources and to miscalculate the file space. It does look like you are trying to install a previous version. I'm pretty sure that the latest version (essential...

A Physical Process is a combination of the Business_Process that is being performed along with the Actor that is performing it and the role that they are playing when they perform this process. For these to complete all the elements on the out-of-the-box Views, you need to make sure that you have an...

Thanks for your post. Interesting that you mention the .exe install file. The installer is actually a '.jar' file and requires your Java environment in order to run. We've noticed that some browsers change the file suffix from .jar to .zip during download which prevents the installer from running. C...

Great work!

Really appreciate your efforts and posting back the resolution.

Keep us posted with your progress

Jonathan

What we're seeing on this trace is Protege loading the metaproject (which tells the server which projects to serve) successfully. Those bits of trace are likely to be information about which ports Protege is going to use, rather than an indication of success. The key statement to look for in the log...

Another quick question: Did you download Protege for Linux with the bundled JVM or without? It's worth confirming that your RMIRegistry is running using the same JVM as the Protege server (it should be from the run_protege_server script but worth checking) A broader coverage of Client-Server trouble...

Hi Charlie, I found this on an Oracle Community forum, which may resolve the issue - certainly worth a try. It concerns how we start the RMIRegistry. Try updating the line in the run_protege_server.sh that starts the RMIRegistry to add the following options: rmiregistry -J-Djava.rmi.server.useCodeba...

Thanks. I appreciate that there's a lot of trace here. Does it contain the following statements at any point in that trace? SEVERE: server startup failed -- java.rmi.ServerException: RemoteException occurred in server thread; nested exception is: java.rmi.UnmarshalException: error unmarshalling argu...

This latest post is duplicate and is being handled HERE

I normally put this in the root folder of the Essential Viewer web application as we would expect that to be running, and makes sure that there are no particular non-web app constraints being applied, e.g. by Tomcat, as per this post . Although CURL seems to work, it could be that there's something ...

This is not the same View. The business organisation structure model is a dynamically-built, interactive organisation chart that uses the Group Actor / Individual Actor classes and relationships. Instances of these classes can be defined arbitrarily and groups can be defined from a team of individua...

This looks like a duplicate post, so we'll close this off and follow up in:

THIS POST

Hi Charlie, I'm pretty sure that this issue will be resolved by the CODEBASE_URL thing. Just to make sure that we haven't missed anything, it's really important that the URL that you specify in that CODEBASE_URL parameter is pointing to an active HTTP server that is running and has the protege.jar f...

Also, is this with Protege 3.5?

Jonathan

Thanks for the feedback, Rick Our concept for Information and Data is that the data provides the elements/building blocks that are used to provide the information. Business Processes produce and consume information via 'applications' (which need not necessarily be IT applications). Our interactions ...

Hi Rick, Thanks for your post. The Data Object Provider Model is a powerful View but is certainly a View that could do with a View Manual. The objective is to show how Data is managed and shared between the systems in the architecture and can show potential [master] data management issues. The main ...

Thanks Peter.

Look forward to your thoughts.
We have a number of organisations that are successfully using these meta model features with some interesting custom views.

Jonathan

You're almost there. All looks good until you hit the Out Of Memory exception. Make sure that you've got at least 1.5-2GB memory allocated for Protege. You'll need this both on the Protege Server and the Protege client. For Protege server, go to your Protege installation directory and edit run_prote...

Hi Peter, These aspects are now part of the core meta model (version 4.x) and so there is no sample repository. Unless this is lacking features that you require, we should close ECP-2. Policies of any kind can be captured in the Governance section of the EA_Support part of the meta model. This enabl...

Thanks very much! Great to hear that you are finding it valuable and we'll keep on adding to it. I agree totally about selecting the relevant aspects of the model and we had a similar challenge when creating models for our training courses and the screenshots in the meta model documentation on this ...

Thanks very much for sharing this - it's excellent knowledge that will certainly be very useful.

Many of the Essential installs are on virtualised servers and we're aware of a number of organisations using AWS as the host environment.

Thanks again for your post!

Jonathan

The UML Backend plugin for Protege works well to create an XMI file containing all the classes and relationships ready to be used in your favourite UML tool. Then you just create a new diagram and drag the relevant classes onto the diagram and all the relationships appear automatically. Now that the...

The Essential to TOGAF 9 mapping is now available to download from the Essential Meta Model Reference page. Scroll down to the section underneath the Support Meta Model section.

Jonathan

Just a quick post to say that we do still intend to make this available as soon as we can.

Jonathan

In this case, 'project' means that Protege project in which your repository is being managed. That is: essential_baseline_v4.3.1.pprj The conversion process is about getting Protege to save the contents of this repository (project) in a database instead of in the essential_baseline_v4.3.1.pins and e...

The reportService servlet is part of the Essential Viewer web application, which normally means that if the Viewer is working, then so should the reportService. Depending on the size of the repository that you are publishing, it is possible that the Tomcat JVM has run out of memory. On Windows, this...

This sounds like you are opening the out-of-the-box 'meta_project.pprj' that is included in a standard Protege installation. We provide an updated version of this, that includes a starting point for the definition for the Essential repository, in the Essential Installer. If you have not already inst...

I Jonathan, We have created a query against the parameter class. We are using this to pass personalized reports to the portal structure. Thanks Colin Hi Colin, Is this the 'Report Parameter' class that you're using? Although this is available, there is not automated support for these in the Essenti...

Hi,

We do indeed have the Essential Meta Model mapping for TOGAF 9.0 but have not published it yet due to lack of interest.

However, we would be happy to publish this over the next few days.

Jonathan

Hi Colin, There are a couple of mechanisms available for passing parameters to the Views and you will see both applied in the out-of-the-box Views. First, the Essential Viewer Engine allows you to pass your own, user-defined parameters as part of the URL, as standard request parameters, e.g. paramet...

That location field in the meta project for the Essential AM Repository instance must point to the location (using the full file path) of the project file for your Essential repository. Let’s say I have created a folder on the D: drive for holding my repositories, called “Essential Repository”. My P...

The metaproject is used to control the configuration of the server for things like the user accounts and the projects that the server will host. In our installer, the "server" package installs a starter metaproject that contains the Essential AM Repository and the Annotations projects. How...

On the firewall side, this can be a bit tricky but this post describing how to configure Protege Server and the RMI Registry will be very helpful. In particular, when you modified the run_protege_server.bat file, I wanted to check that the RMI Registry setting matches what you’ve defined for the fir...

Great to hear that you resolved the SQL Server issue and thanks for posting back. It’s good to have this sort of experience shared with the community. What you’ve got in the DB is correct. The underlying meta-meta- model is very simple and is one of the key reasons that the Essential Meta Model can ...

We’ve tried to provide accurate documentation for the most commonly used platforms, most of which include some form of graphical windowing environment. However, it is possible to run the Essential Installer from the command line and it will follow the same process using a text-based interface. Other...

Good point, we'll update the download page.

I've tested with Protege 3.5 and all seems to be perform normally.

Jonathan

Hi.

Protege 4 is a different product and is not supported by the Essential software. Please download and install Protege 3.5, apply the Essential software plugins to that installation. You should then be able to open the empty baseline repository or one of our sample repositories.

Jonathan

Thanks for posting back and telling us more about your setup. It could well be something about the Azure setup but I wonder if we should look at that firewall. It sounds like there is a firewall between the Protege server and the database server. Is that correct? Also, are there any messages in the ...

Question: Are you changing the lifecycle on the Technology Product itself or on the Technology Product Roles? The view uses the Technology Product Roles to define the status for the use of a product for the relevant component. Note that this could be (and often is) independent of the status of the p...

The capability to import from such sources is already available and we have imported process information from a process modelling tool via XMI but we don't have any generic imports available for things like BPMN or BPEL. Similarly, the ability to export information about the processes defined in the...

Customers are defined as the consumers of Products. We actually use the Actor or the Business Role class to define them. In this way, an Actor (individual or group) can be a customer even of things like ‘internal’ services as well as playing other roles. In the case that you describe, I think we’d u...

I think you and Neil are talking about slightly different things. Neil is correct, the Composite Application Provider inherits all the attributes (slots) of the Application Provider. This means that we can drag the Application Provider instances to Composite Application Provider in order to re-facto...

The way I find works to make that distinction between an Application thing and a Technology thing is to think of the Application (in particular of a packaged application) as the specific configuration that is supporting our business. Parking SaaS for the moment, what we download from the vendor’s si...

We have many successful installs using MS SQLServer as the database. There are some things to watch out for - in particular the format of the JDBC URL is different, compared to MySQL for example, and I've spent a lot of time checking and double checking that before getting the convert to database to...

We've also just released a new beta version of the Import Utility which resolves lots of bugs like this.

You can download it as part of the version 4.3 installer and just select the Import Utility package.

Jonathan

The installation process is the same but I've updated the documentation to make sure that it takes account of all versions.

Thanks again for bringing this to our attention

Jonathan

Yes, absolutely - that's a simple and sensible approach to backing up the repository if you are using the 3 Protege files to store it.

Jonathan

The current out of the box Technology Roadmap needs the Report Constant 'Technology_Roadmap' set in the repository to tell the View which roadmap to render. You will need to re-publish after selecting your roadmap in the report constant.

Jonathan

One thing to note is that the essential publisher will publish to the URL specified in the publish window.. (location pointing to the viewers tomcat webapps directory) you will need to make sure that the publisher url is the same as the one you are viewing in your browser i.e (http://localhost:8080...

Thanks for your post - a really interesting topic. I think it might help if I explain how the Information and Data classes are intended to be used. The first thing to note is that we manage the Information things separately from the Data things, whilst maintaining the links. When using these classes...

Great question! There are certainly some options for how we can capture this but let's start by thinking about what it is that we are interested in capturing. The idea with the Application Layer is that this is where we capture behaviour / functionality. This is what supports our processes. The Tech...

Thanks for your post. Great question. I think the first thing that you need to decide is whether the "Process Levelling" is about granularity (level of detail) or abstraction (how concrete the definitions are). It's very common for process models that work from Level 0 through to e.g. Leve...

You can convert the Protege project to use the database before or after you define the metaproject. I normally do this before defining the meta project but it's no problem if you have already defined the meta project. As some more background, the metaproject tells the Protege server which projects t...

Hi Ian, If the View Manual does not cover it (or there is not a View Manual for the View you've chosen), you can find out which classes and which fields on those are used by the View by looking at the View Template XSL file. The URL for the current view includes a parameter called 'XSL' and its valu...