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Hello, I sent a complex diagram to the support mailbox yesterday. The result of arranging the elements on the diagram is unusable, meaning that it makes the diagram very difficult to understand. For example, entities that are related to each other are not grouped together, and entities (such as Party) that has several relationships are placed on the edge on the diagram rather than the middle. Its also apparent that many lines overlap in many when they really don't have to. I'm curious whether this will be address in the near term. It makes the designer rather difficult to use for larger models. Werner |
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Hi Werner, Yes, the auto arrange feature can be erratic at best. We currently lean on Visual Studio for this, and of course VS doesn't understand the semantics of the models. We've done some work on smarter layout as part of our WPF Diagrams product, and we're hoping to bring that over to LightSpeed to replace the built-in layout engine, but we've not been able to resource that work yet, and we can't currently commit to a timeframe for doing so. It is definitely on our minds though. Thanks for the feedback on this -- it does help us to prioritise! |
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Hi Ivan, Have you ever considered having a standalone application for designing the diagrams and code generation, similiar to devarts Entity Designer? I think it will ease deployment, be more flexible and simpler to use. The biggest advantage to me would be that there is no Visual Studio 2010 add-in and it will reduce the footprint of VS 2010 and improve stabilty. Werner |
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Yes, we have: in fact our first prototype way back in 2007 was a standalone tool. However we rapidly found that the advantages of being integrated into VS far outweighed the disadvantages (believe us, we suffer far more than you do!). We don't expect this to change in the foreseeable future, though we'll keep listening to feedback as always! |
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Hi,
Is there any way to make for example sub diagrams?
I already have 12 entities with several valueobjects. The Diagram is totally mess. The auto arrange feature is only further complicate the situation. The relationnal labels are tend to overlap each other so when 4 label is on the top of each other and the lines are combined in one line, then the diagram starting to be a BIG mess.
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You can filter diagrams using entity names or tags, or you can use linked models to split a diagram across multiple files (though the latter is more complex). See "Custom Views" and "Linked Models" under http://www.mindscapehq.com/documentation/lightspeed/Working-with-Models-in-the-Visual-Designer in the documentation. And of course don't forget you can arrange your diagram nicely by dragging things around manually. |
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