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ForumForumVisio for Enter...Visio for Enter...General Discuss...General Discuss...Large ORM project - segmenting onto pages?Large ORM project - segmenting onto pages?
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 11/17/2005 2:54 PM
 

Is there any guidance at all on how to split up a large ORM project into pages?

One per entity, or does anyone have any other views on how, or indeed, does anyone care?!

Cheers,

 

Martin.

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 11/19/2005 6:11 AM
 

To my knowledge, no one has written down any guidelines.

I segment my models on 8.5 x 11 pages, usually landscaped. By the time I sit down with the tool, I have already done many model fragments on whiteboards and note paper so I have a good idea as to the general structure of the "important facts". These involve key system object types and more or less map to (in ER terms) major entity types. I then decide which to present first, second, and so on in a "top down fashion" so it makes some sense as you read the model from front to back and a given page doesn't use a major, complex object type not already (somewhat) defined before it.

If a given object type has many facts about it that map to attributes (they have a exactly one or zero to one relationship to the OT) I lay those out more or less arbitrarily with the OT in the middle and the related facts down each side. I often re-arrange fact types grouped by contestant participation: e.g. if three facts are in an external uniqueness constraint, they lay next to each other.

Facts about "lookup tables" (e.g. Thing Type Code has thing Type Name) and audit information (e.g. Customer has insert Date) I stuff in the back pages of the model.

Hope that helps,
Scot.
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 11/20/2005 2:22 PM
 

Scot,

Thanks once again for the feedback.  I think that the layout is important to the readability of the diagrams, don't you?  I've also found that the diagrams seem to grow organically, particularly if you're working on agile projects.  ORM lends itself really nicely to design treaking in this way, but the diagrams in VEA don't, because if you cut and paste the diagram, you get another object.

What I have been doing in general is having the central entity in the middle of the page, it's entites and values to the right, and its parent entities to the left.  In general, that seems to work quite nicely, I was just interested in how others lay out their diagrams; thank you for letting me know how you do yours!

I'm also looking for ways to introduce a prescriptive way to use ORM in a project, to document that process for any teams to use.

Cheers,

Martin.

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