Working with diagrams and their components

You can waste away many hours laying out the elements on a diagram. Therefore, this aspect of modeling can be time-consuming. However, a model serves as a documentation and a communication device. Therefore, taking time to ensure that it is well annotated and clearly designed is important. Most of the controls for the models are on the context menu, allowing you to modify individual aspects of the diagram. The context menu changes depending on whether you have an object or line selected, or you're just clicking in the open space. You can also set general defaults by navigating to Tools | Preferences | Data Modeler. In this section, we'll look at the various options available when working with the diagrams.

Formatting the elements

Before moving a relationship line, entity, or table, you can dramatically change the impact and readability of a large diagram just by changing the colors. This is readily demonstrated when importing from two or...