As I outlined in the Archi Roadmap, one of the things I’m working on is the Archi Command Line Interface (ACLI). This has been requested by users for some time, it’s just that I never got around to figuring out a good way to implement it. I’ve now got the bare bones of it coded.
Here’s how it will work. You’ll be able to invoke and launch Archi (probably installed on a server) in “headless” mode via a command line with various aguments to perform certain tasks. For example, to load a *.archimate file and generate a HTML report in a given folder:
Archi -consoleLog -console -nosplash -application com.archimatetool.commandline.app -HTMLReport_InputFile "~/pathtofile/test.archimate" -HTMLReport_OutputFolder "~/ouputfolder"
So this could be part of a bigger batch job triggered by a certain action hosted on a server.
I’m also working on another “Acling” that can be invoked whenever a new version of an Archi model is published using the Archi Collaboration plug-in. This can be triggered from a git hook so that the repository is then cloned or pulled, the model assembled and loaded into Archi, and a new report generated and uploaded to a given location.
How does this work under the hood?
The command line launches a new application, com.archimatetool.commandline.app, which, in turn, hands over to a controller class, the CentralScrutinizer. This avoids loading the UI and other bloat. From here the CentralScrutinizer dispatches the command line arguments to any registered command line providers who can then scan the list of arguments for anything of interest and act accordingly.
If you have any use cases for the ACLI that you would like to see, leave them in the comments below.
