1. Preface

Enterprise Architect¹ (EA) offers a wealth of API functions to support automated manipulation of UML models. However, quite a number of tasks require actions not directly supported by the API. Here the fact comes handy that EA is based on a database model which has proven to be very stable with respect to its structure. The last major change was introduced with audit functionality which added a couple of new tables but left the structure of the existing tables untouched. So you can assume that your add-ins will run in future versions of EA if you follow a few rules.

The contents of this book is the essence of a continuous work with EA since end 2003. It surely lacks prose but likely you won’t need that anyway. I’d call it a hacker’s guide into EA².

Special thanks to Peter Doomen who inspired me to write this book. You likely might be interested in his book Fifty Enterprise Architect Tricks. Also I like to thank Helmut Ortmann for supplying me with most of the query examples and a couple of hints which had passed my attention³. Probably I should mention a couple of other guys⁴ but I’m not going to bother you with my family history.

This book starts with a short introduction on how to query EA’s database. This is followed by a concise list of all available tables and details for the most important ones. The details contain cross references into more details as well as screen shots of the GUI where the appropriate elements appear. Vice versa the screen shots point to the according table columns. The final sections conclude with a practical approach to using SQL in Enterprise Architect.