Sparx Systems Forum
Enterprise Architect => General Board => Topic started by: zoran on June 15, 2006, 02:08:37 pm
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Does anyone know how to create an entity relationship diagram of an applications DB tables.
Zoran
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Zoran,
You need to be able to connect to the application's database via OLEDB, or at least ODBC. [The tool you will use still has "ODBC" in its name from legacy times, but appears to work with OLEDB.]
It would be best to create an OLEDB (or ODBC) data source pointing to your database. This is out of scope here, as it is a standard Windows operation. You can also do this while setting up the import from EA, as it will bring up the standard Windows dialogs for this option.
From within EA, create a package to hold the entities. Select this package in the Project View tree. From the main menu choose Project / Database Engineering / Import DB Schema from ODBC (that's the legacy name I mentioned earlier). Follow the dialogs to use (or create) your data source. There are various options you can set. For now, since you are creating the model in EA for the first time, don't choose to synchronize, and do choose to create diagrams. [You'll get the hang of it, and you can always drop and recreate the EA pacakge and import again with different options.]
The resulting model is not quite an ER diagram, but uses the UML Profile for Data Models (or whatever it's called, check the documentation). If you prefer to see connectors with "crows foot" notation you can make this switch. From the resulting model, use the diagram properties dialog (hotkey is F5) to set the Connector Notation dropdown (half way down on the right side) to Information Engineering (or IDEF1X if you prefer).
David
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Thanks David,
Your instructions worked great!
Zoran