Messages

1

General Board / Re: HowTo: Set Many Properties at Once?

« on: May 02, 2005, 08:58:57 am »

I need some help with this too. If I reverse engineer a database with a lot of tables, it's a problem because the link between each one has five labels, and I always want to turn some of them off. Right now I am selecting each association and then "Set Visibility | Set Label Visibility". I don't seem to be able to select multiple associations or somehow set a global property for the diagram. This is costing me quite a lot of time on a large database.
[Correction - 6 labels]

2

General Board / Re: Setting Label Visibility

« on: April 11, 2005, 09:22:45 am »

I was wondering that myself.

3

General Board / Re: Refresh schema, lose label

« on: March 31, 2005, 01:28:02 pm »

Wow, drilled down through things and found that this field=field text is the link name! Don't know why it got lost in the shuffle, but I manually fixed it up.

I've noticed some funky things about this program. When I have a few minutes I'll write up a list and throw on it the board.

4

General Board / Refresh schema, lose label

« on: March 31, 2005, 01:10:23 pm »

When I drop two tables on a diagram EA nicely creates an association. I like the lable showing which field = which field.

I refreshed my schema. A table "ProductCategories" changed name to "ProductLines". The refresh seemed to go fine (but my ProductCategories table stuck around - might be nice if it prompted me to just drop it).

I deleted ProductCategories from my diagram and dropped ProductLines on it. The association was created, but -- that field=field label is gone now.

I notice that in the frame at the bottom of Product it is not showing FK_Product1, which is the FK for ProductLines . In project view I look at Product operations. Sure enough,  FK_Product1 appears to be missing. But...and now it's getting a bit weird,
when I expand Product in the treeview, I see FK_Product1. But...getting weirder...it shows "FK_Product1(int, int)", and that for sure ain't right.

5

General Board / Re: What is an ERLink?

« on: March 30, 2005, 06:18:03 pm »

OK, guess I'll go with option #2, thanks.

I think EA works real well for me as a ER diagrammer. As for the rest of the UML, I'm reading books but not quite "getting it". I shall keep trying.

6

General Board / Re: What is an ERLink?

« on: March 30, 2005, 03:26:57 pm »

Because I think the arrow at the end of the association I think will confuse my users, for whom an arrow always means "something flows to something". The multiplicity label is there, that's nice, but I wanted to get rid of the arrow, maybe put crow's feet, but at least get rid of the arrow. I changed the connection type to ERLink (I figured ER maybe stood for Entity-Relation) and I didn't get crows' feet but I did get rid of the arrow. Then I decided to check it out, but couldn't find it in the help or even on the forums everywhere. Shouldn't everything be documented somewhere? I have found in my brief experience with EA that there seems to be a lot of little things like this that aren't documented, or at least not well.


Tell you what, though, once I changed the connection types and also got rid of the PK and FK name labels on the connections, leaving just the field= field and multiplicity, I had a pretty nice little set of ERD diagrams. And it's easy to copy to Word.

7

General Board / What is an ERLink?

« on: March 30, 2005, 11:53:21 am »

I searched help and the forum but found nothing. :-/

8

General Board / Re: foreign key on table

« on: March 30, 2005, 09:49:18 am »

Any way to hide individual columns (attributes)? Reason why I might want to do this is, typically I have to create several ERDs because one diagram is just too much to print or even comprehend. So I break the data model up into logical pieces. I might show the entire employee table in one piece, then in another need to show the employee table again, but this time only a few columns are pertinent to other tables in that piece. I've figured out how to hide all the attributes, and that is useful, because I may just want to show the table with no columns (perhaps a note saying refer to different diagram to see all the columns), but again, in some cases, showing some columns and not others might be useful.

9

General Board / Re: foreign key on table

« on: March 30, 2005, 08:55:37 am »

It's interesting that a foreign key is considered an "operation". I've got to get my mind around that...

10

General Board / Re: foreign key on table

« on: March 30, 2005, 08:53:45 am »

Awesome Bruno!

Any way to do that on a more global level, or do I need to hit each table individually?

11

General Board / foreign key on table

« on: March 30, 2005, 08:38:25 am »

Since the columns on a table class are already marked on the side as being a foreign key, I'm not sure what the point of having all the FKs listed in the frame at the bottom is. Takes up a lot of space on what is already a crowded diagram. I can't figure out any way hide them, does someone know?

12

General Board / Re: Graphics, icons

« on: March 13, 2005, 09:57:40 pm »

I can see how using them could be a problem. If I were going to present a deployment diagram to someone, out of context of a complete model, and all it had was nodes which represented computers and printers, it would be nice to use. But blue men......naaahh....

13

General Board / Re: Graphics, icons

« on: March 13, 2005, 06:35:41 pm »

Thanks for the help, Bruno!

14

General Board / Re: Graphics, icons

« on: March 13, 2005, 06:21:19 pm »

Ah thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for.

I do think that creating an Internet cloud should not be a sin, it really does correspond to something - a collection of routers sitting on the wire between two nodes, right?

15

General Board / Graphics, icons

« on: March 13, 2005, 05:53:56 pm »

I'm a bit new to UML but I understand that it's ok to make diagrams easier to understand with the use of icons a graphics in place of built-in symbols. I'd like to use computer and printer icons for nodes, for example. And I need to create an Internet cloud! Is there some handy free clip art sitting around for this kind of thing? I believe EA will let me substitute external images, right? And should EA provide a little grab-bag of the obvious ones (like a cloud)?