System Architect is often used to present high-level views of the architecture in terms of compliance to standards and the relative "health" of a business unit or process. A common technique is to specify status values of model artifacts using the traffic‑light metaphor of red, yellow, and green: for example a red light by a business process might denote a bottleneck.
The matrix editor is an ideal place to show the status of the architecture. You can set the fill color of a cell in a matrix to denote the status of the intersection. The color is based on property of the intersecting cell definition. With this capability, you can produce high-level views that communicate status value through color.
To specify colors to denote the status of a matrix cell
1 The matrix must be a text-in-cell type matrix; in other words, one for which the intersecting cell is represented by an underlying definition.
2 You must specify a property in the underlying cell definition that references a value list, and that value list must contain the fill color keyword for pertinent values.
3 You then need to specify values for the intersecting cell definitions of the matrix, and Reload the matrix after each selection made, to see the color coding.
In the following example, the Business Process (BPMN) to Role matrix is modified to include color coding. Intersecting cells of the Business Process (BPMN) to Role matrix are defined by the definition type PROCESS/ROLE.
4 In the Matrix Browser, right-click a cell and then click Reload. The cell fills with the color you have specified for the Job Status you selected.
