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I am trying to build a simplified EA from 'top to bottom', what I mean is I have a large diagram which has multiple objects, mainly ERDs Entities. I also have more and more detailed diagrams and can successfully drill down by hyperlinking to the next level down.

I have even setup a hyperlink on each of the lower level diagrams to go back to the previous.

So far, so good. When I publish as HTML, I get a really useful web tree that pretty much does what I want, except for one thing!

Each of the lower diagrams are reasonably small, so when I drill back up, I am happy with being positioned at the top left of the previous diagram (with me so far?).

When I drill back up to the primary diagram, I get returned to the top left.

BUT - as this primary diagram prints out on 12 A3 pages, it would be really good to be able to return to the area of the primary diagram that refers to the diagram that I just clicked into/out-of.

I am no deep HTML expert, but I know there is methods in HTML to hyperlink to a specific part of a page. Can anyone think of a way to tweak the returning hyperlink to position me at a specific point in the primary diagram?

PHEW

Thanks, PGB

PGB
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    If your primary diagram stretches over 12 A3 pages you should probably work on your system architecture first. – qwerty_so Jun 06 '16 at 06:39
  • Hi Thomas, thanks for your response. You're right, the top level diagram should be smaller. What I am trying to do is to show on a wall, all the capabilities, starting with Business Capabilities, leading to Business Functions, down to Business Processes then Business Services, IT Services and finally to Systems. Really this is a IT Landscape view. Then I want to connect the real EA Artifacts to it, so linkages can be seen. I accept that EA is probably not the best tool to do this in, but as all our lower level artifacts are modeled in EA, it seemed the best place to try to do this. – PGB Jun 07 '16 at 09:39

2 Answers2

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To my knowledge there is no way to achieve this using EA's hyperlinks. EA does not use HTML internally, and an EA diagram hyperlink has no space for offset or zoom level, it simply opens the diagram.

Normally I would say that if you want an element to do something like this you can code it up yourself in an Add-In, but I'm pretty sure you can't specify pan/zoom when opening a diagram in the API either.

So I'm afraid this is one of those rare occasions where the answer is "you're doing it wrong." Adding all information everywhere is a sure-fire way of ending up with a model that's both impossible to navigate and a nightmare to maintain.

To build a better model you should work with abstractions and/or aspects (hard to say which is the better route forward without doing an actual architectural analysis).

Uffe
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What I do is to create sub-domain diagrams and then drag those onto an overview diagram. They scale down to nearly iconic size but still give an idea of the contents. Now I use large text to explain those sub-domains. This can usually fit to some A3-size (A2 if you like to show off). But from this overview you can easily focus to the single sub-domains by double-clicking the diagram frames.

qwerty_so
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