Hi,
I want to create an Application Landscape Diagram, something like this.
I’m new to VP, so my questions are:
Thank you in advance for help.
That’s a difficult (but also very interesting!) question. First things first: It’s important to realize that higher tiered Visual Paradigm (“VP”) versions get you access to higher tiered diagrams and features. I’m not familiar with landscape diagrams myself, but looked them up and learned that they are most often used within Enterprise Architecture. VP does provide support for EA within the Enterprise edition, but this is mostly centered around ArchiMate, TOGAF and Project management.
Another important issue as of VP version 15 is that not all diagrams can be mixed together. That’s because some diagrams aren’t made within VP itself anymore but using an online interface. Note: with mixing I’m referring to using model elements of different diagram types together within the same diagram (for example: mixing a Use Case with BPMN).
Back to your questions…
The Application diagram isn’t supported by Visual Paradigm (but you already knew this). Now, I could be mistaken but while looking through Google and plenty of examples I noticed that the diagram can have different appearances.
I came across the page about Just in Time Process map and if you scroll down to ‘Work items for analysis’ you’ll notice that this diagram is definitely a step in the right direction.
Problem: I have no idea what type of diagram that is. I did some thorough investigation of course and traced the ‘capability’ element back to the ‘Strategy’ category. If you right click on the palette toolbar then you can add (or remove) different categories, this allows you to mix model elements as mentioned earlier:
Further investigation showed me that these elements can be traced back to the ArchiMate diagram. And if you look at some of the screenshots and examples shown on that page then I think that this is your best option.
Not that I know off. Although there is an option which allows you to import from Excel I get the impression that this only covers diagrams and not necessarily the data you’re working with. Keep in mind though that I never used this option myself before.
Yes and no 
The Standard edition (and up) provide support to add a color legend to your diagrams. This allows you to set up different color schemes for your model elements which you can then apply to them. However, this isn’t an automated task, the selection is always done manually.
It might be possible to write a plugin for this to perform that action, but I don’t know how feasible that would be. It would all depend on being able to access a color legend from within the API and I don’t know from mind if that is possible.
Anyway, hope this could answer some of your questions.
Thank you very much for such a detailed reply! Yes, it’s all about Enterprise Architecture.
VP as a product is great, and if it could adopt the features I’ve mentioned in my message - it could be the greatest, and compete - and disrupt! - the monsters like, say, Erwin (ex-Casewise) Data Modeler.
