Breaking Up a Big Model

Hiya,

I have been tasked with breaking up our rather large Lightspeed 3.0 model (well over 100 entities plus stored procs) into smaller linked models now we have Lightspeed 3.11.

Well, the linked models are awesome but I have a few questions:

1.  I have managed to break it so far into three sub-models and everything still works fine. The group of sub-models behave, as far as my code is concerned, as if it was just the one model.  Neat, everything regression tests beautifully too.   However if I try to right click on one of my referenced entitles on a design surface and select Go To Linked Entity I get the message dialog "Could not find the definition of Client in any linked model". Similarly if I right-click Check Links on the design surface we get the dialog "No models in linked set  Parameter name: models".  
   What have I missed ?  All but one model has Is Linked Child set, they all have the same name and target namespace.
   
   
2. Do you know of a way to move entities from one design sub-model surface to another. So far I'm re-dragging tables from the database onto the sub-model surface until the original and sub-model match and then deleting the table entities from the original model after re-creating any external relationships.  Works, but is slow... 
   
   
3. Worse, stored procedures are really painful. Its very nice that 3.1x auto-generates a result class for dragged on SPs but we didn't have that for our original model, just our own hand generated non-table based entities. So, the best way I've found so far is to:
   
   
   • create an empty SP result entity in the sub-model with the same name as the one in the original mode - save it.
   • copy and paste the entity definition from original.lsmodel to submodel.lsmodel  using my favourite text editor. Save submodel.lsmodel.
   • Back in VS drop the stored proc on the sub-model design surface.
   • Reset the entity type to my copied entity and delete the nicely generated result entity.
     
     
   Whew. I could just reorder/rename the generated result entity if the entities match, but I'm not confident some odd implicit conversions or such may have been hand-coded in.
   
   Is there a nicer way to do this ? This is going to take a loonnngggg time :-(. 

Thanks guys for a cool product, hope you can help me with some of these issues,

Gerry

1. We've had another user report problems with "Go To Linked Entity" but haven't been able to reproduce them.  If you could provide us with a copy of your model project then that might help us track this down and fix it.  (You can attach a zip file via the Options tab.)  Thanks!

2 and 3.  Cut and paste of entities and stored procs isn't currently available.  We'll see if we can get that added, but in the meantime, my secret ninja suggestion is you'll find it easier to remove stuff rather than incrementally move or recreate it.  So:

* Make two additional copies of your original .lsmodel file (making three copies in all).

* Load up each of the three copies.  If you save at this point you'll get lots of errors because of duplicate definitions, of course, but don't worry about that (or load each file up into a separate temporary project).

* In each file:

  - multiple-select the entities that aren't relevant to that subdomain at all and hit Delete

  - multiple-select the entities that aren't part of that file's subdomain, but need to have associations into the file, and set their Is Link property to true (this turns them from real entities into links)

  - multiple-select the stored procs that aren't part of the subdomain and hit Delete

Selecting a bunch of things and hitting delete or setting a common property should be a lot faster and more reliable than recreating things from Server Explorer or copying and pasting one thing at a time.

NOTE: Turning entities into links will cause validation warnings ("External reference Entity1 defines its own properties.  These will be ignored.").  These will not cause errors and can be ignored; however, if you want to be clean and get rid of them, then delete all entity properties out of each entity that you're going to turn into a link before setting Is Link to true.

* Once you've done this across all three files you should be good to go.

Thanks Ivan,

Sounds like a much more reliable approach. I did think overnight of maybbe scripting/writing a small app to move entities across sub-models but I don't really know the rules about how the .diagram files relate to .models and I would have to work out the xml structure or both file types. Your copy-delete method will probably cost less time and effort and be more reliable anyway, thanks.

Drag-drop across sub-models sounds like a very good product enhancement,I look forward to seeing in in Lightspeed NT :)  Meanwhile if you feel inclined to make up a move-entity script or app....

Gerry

P.S. Not allowed really to put our models into public domain, is there a private address I can send the zip to ? Would you need the whole project or just the .model/.diagram/.cs files for the entities ? 

You can send the files to ivan @ the obvious domain name.  I'd like to have the project rather than just the .lsmodel files because when we add these files into our own projects they tend to work which makes me think it may be a project layout issue.  You can remove all files except the .lsmodel/diagram files if there's a lot of them, but if you could keep the project *structure* intact then that would be handy.  Thanks!

(Also, please ensure the zip file doesn't contain any binaries, as our mail provider discards messages containing binaries without even showing them to us.)

Looks like this was an issue with model files being in project folders rather than the project root.  I've got a fix wending its way through the build system and it should be in the 28 August nightly.  Give that a go on Monday and let me know if you still see problems.