Using the Validator

To run the SID Validator, start RSA, load a SID project (official version, development branch, or an older version), select an ABE (or the entire model) from the project explorer and press the SID validator button from the toolbar (see below)

Alternatively you can select the SID Validator command from the TMForum menu

A dialog with all the validations will pop up 

In this dialog you can select specific validations for this run (more on this in a future version). After you select the validations, and press OK the validator starts to run and creates a log with all the errors in the console window:

You can now browse the log and see where your model does not conform to the SID modeling guidelines. As of version 2 of the validator, a click on the element that is validated will select this element in the project explorer so you can easily find and fix the validation errors.

A detailed description of all the validation can be found here

If you want to capture the validator log in text (to store in  a document or share via email), it is easier to see the elements' qualified names in the validator rather than the short names. In order to produce such a log, use the command Copy Validator Log from theTMForum menu

You can now paste the log to a text editor (without coloring) or to a word processor or email program (with coloring), all elements will appear as qualified names. The same log that appears above looks like this after copying and pasting into MSWord

Note: if you just copy the text from the console window (using Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C) the text that you paste will contain the short names and not the qualified names of the entities.

Exporting the SID to Excel

To run the SID Exporter, start RSA, load a SID project (official version, development branch, or an older version), select an ABE (or the entire model) from the project explorer and press the SID exporter button from the toolbar (see below)

Alternatively you can select the Export SID to Excel command from the TMForum menu

A dialog asking for a configuration file pops up. 

More on properties files and how to configure them can be found in SID Export Configuration File page

Then a dialog is opened to select the output excel file location

Then the SID exporter runs (it may take up to 25 seconds pending on the machine) and the model is exported to the excel file. 

In the Console window you will see a message that the export is completed with links to the properties file (input) and to the generated excel file (output).

Note: The hyperlinks to the files work on Windows operating system only, and will not work on other operating systems.

What's new

Version 3:

• Added new command to export SID to excel. This command is used for the generation of the Information Framework Excel Format file for every release.
• Added new validator for empty entities (entities without attributes or associations including inherited attributes/associations), this is a more generalized case of orphan entities since such entities can have an empty base class.
• Added a check for attribute default value, to create a warning when attribute has a default value (against SID guidelines). 

Version 2: 

• Messages on console window now contains hyperlinks to all related entities
  • As part of this change some of the messages were changed in order to fit the new format
  • A new command was added to the TMForum menu, Copy Validator Log. This command copies the log to the clipboard and changes the hyperlinks to the qualified names (as appeared in V1). Thus when copying the text to a document or an email, it is more readable and there is enough information to easily find the elements referred to in the log.

   

• New Validators:
  • Entity not in diagrams validator, checks for entities (classes and association classes, but not base types) that do not appear in any diagram (class or freeform) in the model.
  • Base type location warns about base classes which are not defined in the base types ABE (in CBE domain) 
• Modified Validators:
  • All documentation validations now warn when documentation includes long dash "–" (that is created typically by MS Word)
  • Only figures in figures package validator now also checks for figures which are on non-figures ABEs (which are not marked as doNotImplement)

   

Version 1:

Initial version 

Future Plans

• Make all the qualified names in the log (the blue strings) hyper links into the project explorer -ü-Done!

• Make the validator always run on the entire SID model and just control the report according to the selected ABEs (thus the global validations will be accurate even when validating a single ABE)

• Add more validations as required by the community and the TIP project

• Add the export SID to Excel code to this plugin (as a different operation)

More suggestions are welcome!

Installing the SID Validator

If you have older version of the validator you need to first follow the uninstall instructions

For installing the SID validator follow the following instructions

1. Download the validator zip file
2. Locate the SDP folder of your RSA installation (for example, C:\Program Files\IBM\SDP-9)
3. Find the dropins folder under the SDP folder, if it does not exist create folder and name it "dropins"
4. Extract the jar file from the zip you downloaded in step 1 into the dropins folder from step 3
5. Restart RSA - you should see a new toolbar with a SID validator and the SID export  icons and the TMForum menu item  as in the following image:                                                                        
6. That's it - the validator is installed.

Removing Older Version of the Validator

If you need to remove older version of the validator, just go to the dropins folder (see above) and remove the file org.tmforum.tools_*.jar (the exact name includes version and date for example org.tmforum.tools_1.0.0.v201311FX13_5.jar)