New features, improvements and fixes are listed in the Version History.

Here’s a summary of some of the new features in Archi 5.5.

Add line style to diagram objects (solid, dotted, dashed and none)

You can now set the line style for a diagram object to one of either Solid, Dotted, Dashed, or None. This is available in the “Appearance” tab for an object’s Properties:

Delete object in a View and keep children

This is available from the main “Edit” menu or when right-clicking an object in a View. It allows you to delete selected objects but retain the object’s child objects. Child objects are re-parented to the selected object’s immediate parent. This action deletes the selected objects from the View not from the model.

Improvements to Model Tree Search Filter

The Model Tree Search Filter now has some new features:

• Filter on Views – you can now select this as a type to filter on in addition to ArchiMate concept types.
• Add an explicit filter setting for User Property values – you can select this to search explicitly on property values, in addition to name and documentation.
• User property keys are now selected in a dialog. This solves the problem of selecting from a list of many property keys.
• Regular expressions – the search filter now supports (Java based) regular expressions. This can be selected in the search filter drop-down menu. If the regular expression is invalid the search text will show in red. An example of a regular expression is (?i)(\W|^)(business|customer)(\W|$) which will match objects that contain the words “business” or “customer”. Regular expressions are applied to the selected target of name, documentation, property value or property key.
• Match Case – you can now choose to match case on the search expression. This can be selected in the search filter drop-down menu.
• Some search filter settings are now saved between sessions.

Diagram connections are now hidden when nested

Non-ArchiMate connections (say between a Note or Group and another element) are now hidden when one is nested inside of the other. This can help if you want to maintain a connection between one object and another for a Label Expression but keep it hidden.

Nested connection to connections are no longer deleted but are now hidden

Before now if you created connection to connections and then nested and un-nested these you’d have to re-create them. Also, an issue with possible dangling connections when nesting connections with connections has been fixed.

More…

There are several other improvements and bug fixes in Archi 5.5 which contribute to its stability and usability. See the full Version History.

Thanks to our Archi Supporters!

And once again, we’d like to thank everyone for their support on Patreon and from other donations. Without this support Archi 5.5 would not have been possible. If you’d like to support Archi please join us at Patreon.

New features, improvements and fixes are listed in the Version History.

Here’s a summary of some of the new features in Archi 5.4.

Improvements, optimisations and fixes

This version focuses on improvements associated with the underlying Eclipse framework and includes many internal fixes and optimisations.

Archi is built on the Eclipse framework which has a 3-monthly release cycle. With each new Archi build we try to use the latest version of Eclipse in order to fix underlying bugs and regressions in the framework. Unfortunately, some versions of Eclipse contain other problems and can’t be used. It’s taken until Eclipse 4.32 (June 2024 release) to get to a version that should hopefully be stable. We are now ready to target Eclipse 4.32 in Archi 5.4. This build should fix a number of issues, especially on Mac and Linux.

New option on Mac to scale fonts to compensate for DPI differenced between platforms

There’s a new option on Mac under Settings, Appearance, Fonts – “Scale fonts for diagram objects and connections on Mac”. When this is selected, fonts used in diagram (View) objects and connections are adjusted to match the native DPI (dots per inch) on Mac. This ensures fonts appear to be the same size when sharing a model between Mac, Windows and Linux.

For example, you might work on an Archi model on Windows and set the font height for an object to 10. However, when opening the model on Mac the font will appear too small because Mac uses 72 DPI while Windows uses 96 DPI. Conversely, you might set the font height on Mac but it appears too big on Windows. This setting adjusts for this difference so that font heights appear the same on all platforms.

Note – Selecting this option automatically switches the default font from “Lucida Grande 12” to “Lucida Grande 9” and vice-verca to compensate for the new scaling. After changing this option, you may want to manually set a different default font by clicking the “Edit…” button.

Add support for Palette entry key bindings

You can now assign your own key bindings (shortcuts or “hot keys”) to Palette entries. These can be set in the “Keys” tab in Archi’s Preferences:

The key bindings will appear in each Palette entry’s tooltip:

There’s a new context, “In Archi Diagrams”, that you can assign to a key binding in the “When” field so that the key binding is only active when a diagram has the focus. This allows you to use key combinations that would otherwise be used when, for example, editing text.

Some other new key binding settings have also been added including “Select in Model Tree” and the order of View objects (send to back and bring forward). As with the Palette entries, you can set these in the “Keys” tab in Archi’s Preferences.

Optimisations to the Models Tree and Search Filters

The Models Tree should be a bit more responsive when switching between Views and when using the Search Filter. The Search Filter now correctly remembers the last expanded/collapsed state when closing the Search bar.

More…

There are several other improvements and bug fixes in Archi 5.4 which contribute to its stability and usability. See the full Version History.

Thanks to our Archi Supporters!

And once again, we’d like to thank everyone for their support on Patreon and from other donations. Without this support Archi 5.4 would not have been possible. If you’d like to support Archi please join us at Patreon.

New features, improvements and fixes are listed in the Version History.

Here’s a summary of some of the new features in Archi 5.3.

Add option to add only unique Properties in Multiple Add dialog

When adding multiple properties you now have the option to add only those properties that are unique. Press “Add Unique” if you want to add all selected Properties that don’t already exist in the target.

There are several other improvements and bug fixes in Archi 5.3 which contribute to its stability and usability. See the full Version History.

Thanks to Archi Supporters

And once again, we’d like to thank everyone for their support on Patreon and from other donations. Without this support Archi 5.3 would not have been possible. If you’d like to support Archi please head over to Patreon.

New features, improvements and fixes are listed in the Version History.

Here’s a summary of some of the new features in Archi 5.2.

Support multi-selection editing of User Properties

You can now create, delete and edit user properties for more than one selected object.

Can now set line widths on figures

The line widths of figures (borders) can now be set to one of “Normal”, “Medium”, and “Heavy” in line with the line widths of connections.

“Derive line colour from fill colour” is no longer an application setting and can now be set for each figure in the Properties Appearance tab

This setting can now be applied to each figure in the Properties tab rather than it being a global application setting.

There are several other improvements and bug fixes in Archi 5.2 which contribute to its stability and usability. See the full Version History.

Thanks to Archi Supporters

And once again, we’d like to thank everyone for their support on Patreon and from other donations. Without this support Archi 5.2 would not have been possible. If you’d like to support Archi please head over to Patreon.

New features, improvements and fixes are listed in the Version History.

Here’s a summary of some of the new features in Archi 5.1.

Set Concept Type

This is a feature that has been requested for some time – the ability to change an existing ArchiMate element or relationship to a different type. There may be times when you have created a concept and you change your mind or a change in the model necessitates a change.

This is available from the right-click menu in a View and the Models Tree for selected ArchiMate elements and relationships.

Those of you who use jArchi will already be familiar with the “Change Type to…” scripts that ship with jArchi. When this was implemented it was, for technical reasons, “easier” (nothing is easy!) to do it in jArchi. But now we’ve implemented it in native code, it opens up the feature to all Archi users.

One of the problems with changing an existing ArchiMate concept type is if it is already connected to other concepts according to the ArchiMate meta-model. Changing a concept’s type creates a new set of valid relationships with other concepts and may invalidate existing ones. In this case these relationships are changed to the Association type and an optional note added to the Documentation field such as “(Changed from Access Relation)”. Please be aware that even if a connected relationship type is still valid after the concept change and remains unchanged, its context may be different and may in fact represent a different derived relationship. Something to be aware of.

Show Specialization elements in the “New” menu of the Models Tree

Specialized elements can be now be added in the Models Tree.

If you have created Specializations of ArchiMate elements these can now be added to the Models Tree just like creating a new ArchiMate concept instance in the Models Tree. If the Specialized element has an image this will show in the menu. This feature can be disabled in Preferences if required.

Thanks to Archi Supporters

And once again, we’d like to thank everyone for their support on Patreon and from other donations. Without this support Archi 5.1 would not have been possible. If you’d like to support Archi please head over to Patreon.

Here’s a summary of some of the new features in Archi 5.

Support for ArchiMate 3.2

Archi 5 has support for ArchiMate version 3.2. This is a minor revision to the specification that changes some of the relationship rules, graphical representations of some of the elements (colours, figures, etc) and some other changes. Read about what’s changed here.

We’ve added new icons and alternate figures for many of the ArchiMate elements to match those in ArchiMate 3.2. Some of the relationship rules have changed so you might want to run Archi’s Validator to see if anything needs updating.

Archi data location

Archi 4 stores all of its data in a location depending on platform:

Linux: [home directory]/.archi4
Windows: [home directory]/AppData/Roaming/Archi4
Mac: [home directory]/Library/Application Support/Archi4

The problem is that for Windows and Mac users these folders are in parent folders that are hidden by default. So it can be a problem for some users to access their jArchi scripts, coArchi repositories and Jasper Reports templates. For Archi 5 we’ve decided to split application data and user data into two separate locations. Application data (preferences, UI state, plug-ins) will be stored in the following locations:

Linux: [home directory]/.archi
Windows: [home directory]/AppData/Roaming/Archi
Mac: [home directory]/Library/Application Support/Archi

And user data (jArchi scripts, coArchi repositories and Jasper Reports templates) will be stored in the following location for each platform:

[home directory]/Documents/Archi

This will also ensure that you can run Archi 4.x and Archi 5 simultaneously.

To ensure a smooth migration, when Archi 5 is first run it will check if the default Archi 4 folder exists and, if it does, offer to copy all the Archi 4 files to the new target folders.

New Secure Storage

In Archi 5 secure information such as passwords will be stored using Eclipse’s secure storage framework. This also means that a primary password does not need to be provided each time, as this is stored in the system’s keychain or credentials manager.

For now this new framework is only used for network proxy credentials but will be used for more things later (coArchi 2 and other plug-ins that are under development). coArchi 1 will continue to use its own mechanism for storing passwords.

Network Connections Preferences

You can now set network proxy settings here. This means that “Check for Updates” will work through a proxy. Note that coArchi 1 will continue to use its own mechanism for proxy settings.

Key Bindings Preferences

This has been requested for a long time. In Archi 5 you’ll be able to customise key bindings for various Archi commands.

Note that some key binding commands are not relevant to Archi and are present because of the underlying Eclipse framework. Examples of these are “Add Bookmark”, “Close Perspective”, “Content Assist” and several others. Should you accidentally invoke a command and Archi does not display or behave as expected, you can reset by selecting “Help -> Reset Archi to Defaults… -> Reset User Interface”.

This also means that jArchi 1.4 (coming soon) will have support for custom key bindings to run scripts.

Other Changes

Of course there are plenty more changes in Archi 5. The full list of changes in the Version History.

Thanks to Archi Supporters

And finally, we’d like to thank everyone who has supported Archi on Patreon and from other donations. Without this support Archi 5 would not have been possible.

The focus of this release has been to add some useful new features such as Specializations in the Palette, minor improvements, and stabilise the code base upon the latest release of the Eclipse platform.

Please download Archi 4.10 here.

Specializations

The main feature in Archi 4.9 is support for specializations of ArchiMate concepts and image support for all objects.

The ArchiMate specification describes the use of specialization of elements and relationships as follows:

Specialization is a simple and powerful way to define new elements or relationships based on the existing ones. Specialized elements inherit the properties of their generalized elements… Also, new graphical notation could be introduced for a specialized concept, but preferably with a resemblance to the notation of the generalized concept; e.g., by adding an icon or other graphical marker, or changing the existing icon. A specialized element or relationship strongly resembles a stereotype as it is used in UML. The stereotype notation with angled brackets may also be used to denote a specialized concept.

In Archi 4.9, you can access the Specializations Manager from the Tools menu:

Here, you can create unique specializations and attach images that can be displayed for objects in a diagram View.

Once defined, the specialization can be applied to an ArchiMate element or relationship through the new “Specialization” field in the Properties tab. Note that you can also access the Specializations Manager from the “three dots” button on the right of the “Specialization” field:

Custom icon for specialization

When a specialization has been set on an element, the default ArchiMate icon (on the top right corner) is replaced by the specialization’s image if one has been defined in the Specialization Manager. The image position can be set to one of 9 positions or fill.

Custom images

A new “Image” property tab has been added:

Non ArchiMate objects (e.g. visual notes) only have two options, Image and Position.

Alternate Figures

We’ve also added all the alternate figures for ArchiMate elements as defined in the ArchiMate 3.1 specification.

Other Specialization features

Specialization support also appears in many of Archi’s other features – Copy/Paste, Format Painter, Label Expressions, Reports, Model Import, CSV Import/Export and Alasql DB. And, of course, we’ve added support to jArchi, the scripting plug-in, and some support to coArchi, the collaboration plug-in (although more comprehensive support will be added in coArchi version 2 coming next year).

New HTML Report

The HTML Report has had a makeover and has a new flat theme together with a zoom slider for diagrams, a search bar in the model tree and support for deep links.

Archi for Mac Silicon

We also now support a native Mac Silicon build of Archi. The existing Intel version runs fine under Apple’s Rosetta 2 but we’ve provided this version in case you want to take advantage of the increased performance. Bear in mind that we are dependent on Eclipse’s support for Silicon so some UI elements are slightly different.

A solid foundation

Apart from features that you see on the surface, we’ve also done a lot of work to support the foundations of Archi. We have a new Maven based build system, we build on the latest version of Eclipse so that we can support the latest operating systems, and, this year, we have forked the underlying Eclipse libraries – GEF (Graphical Eclipse Framework), Draw2D and Zest. This means we can fix bugs and maintain our own versions of these frameworks to ensure that Archi will continue to work on the desktop for years to come.

More to come…

When Archi 1.0 was released in June 2010 probably no-one thought that would it would be still going strong 11 years later. In fact, it feels like we’re just getting started. The new features in Archi 4.9 are the foundation for more developments in Specializations and Profiles. We’re also working on new versions of coArchi and jArchi.

Thanks again to everyone who has supported Archi for the last 11 years.

The new features, improvements and fixes in this release are listed in the Version History.

As well as updates and fixes to Archi’s UI and themes, this release adds support for macOS Big Sur.

We’ve crammed in a lot of new features, improvements and fixes into this release so please take a look at the full list of changes in the Version History.

Here’s an overview of just a few of the new features in Archi 4.7.

Label Expressions

An object or connection in a View normally displays just its name. But it may be that you wish to display some other value, perhaps your own text, or the object’s name as well as its documentation, or the value of a property declared elsewhere. Or you might declare different language strings for an object and then display a different string depending on the value of a “master” language setting declared in a property of the model.

With Archi’s new Label Expressions feature you can customise what’s displayed for an object by using expressions such as {name} or {documentation}.

See the Label Expressions Wiki for a detailed list of possible expressions.

Model Import/Merge

It’s now possible to import one Archi model into another. If the imported model’s objects don’t exist in the target model they are created, and if they do exist they are optionally updated.

You might wish to import one model into another as a one-off operation or you could maintain a model as a reference model that you can update separately and re-import as required.

After the import is performed you can see in the status dialog what, if anything, was updated or added. Of course, you can undo the import if required.

Improvements to the User Interface

Gradients

You can now set gradients per diagram object (“None”, “Top”, “Right”, “Left”, “Bottom”) rather than globally for the application:

Application Fonts

You can now set the font to use for application text and tree controls. These include single line text controls (for example, the “Name” text field), multi-line text controls (for example, the “Documentation” text control), the Model Tree, the Navigator Tree, the Properties Table, and the Analysis Tables.

You might wish to set a mono-spaced font for the Documentation field so that the text aligns:

Other features

There are many more features and fixes in Archi 4.7 and we suggest you explore them by downloading Archi 4.7 and reading the User Guide.

Many thanks for support, we hope you enjoy Archi 4.7 and future updates and plug-ins!