One more designer suggestion

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Scaramanga
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Posts: 57
Joined: 24-Mar-2011
# Posted on: 14-Apr-2011 15:27:33   

Could it be possible to have entities in the model in different colours.

Within our main model we different product areas:

  • Accounts
  • Maintenance
  • Purchasing

etc

Could it be possible to assign a different background to certain entities so when looking at the model you always knew Accounts was light blue etc, Purchasing 'light red' etc ?

You could also use it to highlight new entities in the model.

I noticed another designer did this and I thought it was a nice touch.

It's not a biggie, just a suggestion. It's probably bit of a hassle storing the colour property for the entity and having a dialog or something to set the selected entity (or multiple selection) background. You might need the ability to set the font colour as well. Regards,

Norman.

MTrinder
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Posts: 1461
Joined: 08-Oct-2008
# Posted on: 14-Apr-2011 19:45:54   

I'll ask the dev team to take a look at this for you.

Matt

Otis avatar
Otis
LLBLGen Pro Team
Posts: 39738
Joined: 17-Aug-2003
# Posted on: 15-Apr-2011 11:54:04   

Why not create different model views for the areas? You don't need a big model with everything in it, just create different model views for the focus areas you want, and group the entities in groups in the designer, so the group name is in the entity name.

Would that work for you? We didn't go the coloring route because you can create different model views (entities can be in as many modelviews as you like) so coloring isn't really needed to distinguish which entities belong to what (the EFvNext designer will have this btw, but they're using a big canvas so they have to)

Frans Bouma | Lead developer LLBLGen Pro
Scaramanga
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Posts: 57
Joined: 24-Mar-2011
# Posted on: 15-Apr-2011 12:20:12   

Frans,

That does make more sence, since we have 600+ tables one model would be pretty challenging.

I take it you can link the models ?

Otis avatar
Otis
LLBLGen Pro Team
Posts: 39738
Joined: 17-Aug-2003
# Posted on: 15-Apr-2011 14:21:42   

Scaramanga wrote:

Frans,

That does make more sence, since we have 600+ tables one model would be pretty challenging.

I take it you can link the models ?

I think you are still too much into the EF designer mind set wink

In the llblgen pro project, you have your 600+ entities. You can group them into groups if you like. These groups and their entities are shown in the project explorer.

Over these groups you can create modelviews to have a more visual view on a group of entities. So they 'view' a part of the model in the project, so the actual model is in the project, and you look at parts of the model through model views in a visual way.

Say you have order, customer, orderline, product in 1 view, and order, employee, department, manager in another. As they both view the same model (i.e the entities in your project), 'Order' in both is the same entity.

Frans Bouma | Lead developer LLBLGen Pro
Scaramanga
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Posts: 57
Joined: 24-Mar-2011
# Posted on: 15-Apr-2011 16:44:53   

LOL

Yup, guilty as charged, ORM behaved in a similar fashion as EF for model linking, thankfully I decided to check you guys out before commiting to either wink

What you describe will do the very nicely.

Thanks,

Norman.

Otis avatar
Otis
LLBLGen Pro Team
Posts: 39738
Joined: 17-Aug-2003
# Posted on: 15-Apr-2011 19:34:32   

smile

Frans Bouma | Lead developer LLBLGen Pro