Sometimes a team of developers could be working on the same Enterprise Architect model. Each developer might store their version of the source code in their local file system, but not always at the same location as their fellow developers.

Local paths take a bit of setting up, but if you want to work collaboratively on source and model concurrently, the effort is well worth while.

For example: developer A stores their .java files in a C:\Java\Source directory, while developer B stores theirs in D:\Source. Meanwhile, both developers want to generate and reverse engineer into the same Enterprise Architect model located on a shared network drive (or replicated).

To handle this scenario, Enterprise Architect enables you to define local paths for each Enterprise Architect user, using the Local Paths dialog (select the Settings | Local Paths menu option).

In our example, Developer A might define a local path of

JAVA_SOURCE = "C:\Java\Source"

All classes generated and stored in the Enterprise Architect project are stored as:

%JAVA_SOURCE%\<xxx.java>.

Developer B now defines local path as:

JAVA_SOURCE ="D:\Source".

Now, Enterprise Architect stores all java files in these directories as:

%JAVA_SOURCE%\<filename>

On each developer's machine, the filename is expanded to the correct local version.