(Feature) Autocomplete and match existing objects

[chriskl]

Archi does a great job of noticing when you've drawn in a relationship that already exists in the model and prompts you to re-use it. However, it doesn't do this for objects.

What would be great is:

1. As you type the name of a newly created object, it offers autocomplete suggestions from existing objects in the model.

• If you select an autocomplete entry it drops an instance of that existing object in place instead of the new one
• if you continue typing and the name is still the name of an existing object, when you hit enter or blur the object, a popup dialog offers you the choice of (a) creating a new object with an identical name to the existing or (b) choose to use instead one from a list of existing objects with that name

2. An object 'merge' function. Select 2 or more objects of the same type in the Model browser and merge them into one, all views are updated

3. A more general 'Find objects with identical names'. That will let you find mistakes in your model easily and offer a quick way to merge them.

In general, it's likely a mistake to have identically named objects of the same type in a model, but this mistake is really easy to make unless one has an encyclopaedic memory of the model. And once you've made the mistake, it's really hard to fix it.

[tjsiefring]

The auto-complete would be great. I can see a need for 2 & 3 but 1 I think would be far more useful to me.

[kyrreb]

This suggested feature would be a great improvement to prevent duplicating elements in the repository. Especially for teams of architects with more than one or two people working in the same repository, this would help in keeping the repo clean and free of duplicates and clutter.

In the meantime I should point out that "Validate model" is a powerful tool to clean up the repo. But it is reactive, not proactive.