> I'm working for the same organisation as @chrisjschultz. Recently I've come up with an alternative approach to address our Enterprise-wide use case, which doesn't involve forking the DSL parser, or using !include to build the Enterprise-wide workspace. Instead, separate workspace DSL files are parsed individually, and then merged. The benefit is that our individual system workspaces are compatible with standard Structurizr products. They're also more conventional, with everything in one file, not spread out over DSL fragments.

[mathias-muench]

I have my own approach that I've showing at conferences over the past few months too (https://github.com/structurizr/examples/tree/main/dsl/system-catalog ... it similarly parses DSL files owned by each team, albeit with a central catalog to avoid reconciliation/merging issues), so it would be nice to centralise the various approaches to using the DSL at scale, because they all have trade-offs. Originally posted by @simonbrowndotje in https://github.com/structurizr/dsl/discussions/238

Following a similar approach I would like to use json-workspaces in the chain (or as "system-catalog") that were created by structurizr-java (groovy in my case). The reason is that I want to connect to enterprise catalogs (databases or the infamous Excel files) to create actors, systems and so on.

I cannot figure out how to refer to an element in a json workspace in a dsl workspace extending the json. I use this groovy to create the json.

@Grab('com.structurizr:structurizr-client')
import com.structurizr.Workspace
import com.structurizr.api.StructurizrClient
import com.structurizr.model.Model
import com.structurizr.model.Person
import com.structurizr.model.SoftwareSystem
import com.structurizr.model.Tags
import com.structurizr.view.Shape
import com.structurizr.view.Styles
import com.structurizr.view.SystemContextView
import com.structurizr.view.ViewSet

import com.structurizr.util.WorkspaceUtils

Workspace workspace = new Workspace("Getting Started", "This is a model of my software system.")
Model model = workspace.getModel();      

// create a model to describe a user using a software system
Person user = model.addPerson("User", "A user of my software system.")
SoftwareSystem softwareSystem = model.addSoftwareSystem("Software System", "My software system.")
softwareSystem.addProperty("structurizr.dsl.identifier", "s")
user.uses(softwareSystem, "Uses")

// create a system context diagram showing people and software systems
ViewSet views = workspace.getViews()
SystemContextView contextView = views.createSystemContextView(softwareSystem, "SystemContext", "An example of a System Context diagram.")
contextView.addAllSoftwareSystems()
contextView.addAllPeople()

    // add some styling to the diagram elements
Styles styles = views.getConfiguration().getStyles()
styles.addElementStyle(Tags.SOFTWARE_SYSTEM).background("#1168bd").color("#ffffff")
styles.addElementStyle(Tags.PERSON).background("#08427b").color("#ffffff").shape(Shape.Person)

WorkspaceUtils.saveWorkspaceToJson(workspace, new File("hello.json"))

Using the DSL:

workspace extends hello.json {
model {
	world = softwareSystem "World"
	s -> world "analyzes"
}

This results in workspace.dsl: The source element "s" does not exist at line 4 of /usr/local/structurizr/workspace.dsl: s -> world "analyzes".

How can I refer to an element in DSL that was created in Java?