Polarion connector for IBM Rhapsody 2503
We are excited to present our latest release, the Polarion Connector for IBM Rhapsody 2503. In this update, we’ve added a number of exciting and useful productivity improvements. Here’s a summary of what’s new:
- New Clean-Up Wizard
- New “Update All Backlinks” option
- New recursive publish option
- New hide/show navigation pane option for the embedded Polarion browser in Rhapsody
- New option in the mapping configuration for using “main diagram” or “all linked diagrams” during backlink processing
- Support for self-signed certificates
- General bug fixes and overall improved compatibility
Let’s take a detailed look at some of these new features:
New Clean up wizard
After you’ve either created Rhapsody surrogates inside Polarion through backlink processing, or through the publish operation, it’s not uncommon to further edit the Rhapsody model. These changes could include deleting previously linked model elements or changing the link relationships to Polarion work items. These changes need to be reflected back inside Polarion.
With this new release, we’ve added a new clean-up option that will either automatically delete Rhapsody surrogates inside Polarion if those model elements have been deleted by the user from the model. The new clean-up wizard can also delete Rhapsody surrogate outgoing links inside Polarion and, if necessary, remove any stereotype information from the model.
The clean-up wizard has two different operating modes: Basic and Advanced. By default, the basic mode is available at startup, although the user can choose to use the advanced mode by changing the system properties. The difference between the two operating modes is that the advanced mode performs the clean-up over several phases and can also work with published items that need to be treated as special cases.
When using the new clean-up wizard, users will see a new dialog box informing them of what clean-up needs to be done. Users can choose to continue with the clean-up or cancel the operation, in which case no changes will be made to Polarion.
New update backlinks option
It’s not uncommon to have multiple source documents imported from Polarion into Rhapsody as packages. The work items in those documents can, of course, be linked to Rhapsody model elements. At the same time, you may have direct links from model elements to Polarion work items. Previously, you needed to select the container or specific element to update the backlinks inside Polarion. With this new version of the connector, you can now choose to update all the backlinks in the model at once. We believe this makes working with the connector and backlinks much easier than before.
New recursive link option
Although in the previous version of the connector, you could multi-select elements to publish, it wasn’t possible to simply select a top-level container (e.g., package) and then publish everything beneath it to Polarion. With this new release, users can now choose to publish all model elements inside a Rhapsody package to Polarion at once. Again, we believe this will make working with the connector much easier and faster than before.
New hide/show navigation pane option for the embedded Polarion browser in Rhapsody
A new option has been added to the connector taskbar to hide the Polarion navigation pane on the left side. This helps maximize screen real estate.
New option in the mapping configuration for using “main diagram” or “all linked diagrams” during backlink processing
We added a new option to make working with Rhapsody diagrams more flexible. Since a model element can exist in multiple Rhapsody diagrams, we added a new configuration option to allow customers to choose how the connector processes these diagrams. Users can choose to use the main diagram associated or choose to use any diagram where the model element exists.
The new release of the Polarion Connector for Rhapsody is available now from the Siemens Support Center. You can also read more about the release as well as watch demo videos from our Polarion Extensions Portal here.
Happy modeling ! 
Adrian
