During UI design, having screen mock-ups could give others a better idea as to what users would be looking at when interacting with the system. With Visual Paradigm’s products ( e.g. Visual Paradigm for UML), you can create mock-ups using user interface diagrams. Apart from static visual presentation, you may also simulate navigation between screens after publishing your project to HTML files.
Visual Paradigm supports data modeling with ERD and a set of engineering features like the reverse engineering and generation of database. The features are related with each other. For example, you may generate a database from physical ERD. In order to construct a data model that helps you build a database properly, you need to name the entities and their columns properly. Besides, data types of columns should be well-considered. Just to take the type ‘char’ example, there are quite a number of similar types like varchar, varchar2, nvarchar, etc. If a wrong type is chosen for any column, you may get data corruption or result in data lost.
Visual Paradigm supports all the data types you can find in any supported database management system (DBMS). You can select any data type you want for columns when drawing ERD. As the supported data types vary depending on the target version of DBMS, you need to set in the database configuration page the version of DBMS you use. With this, Visual Paradigm can list out those supported types, preventing you from selecting a non-supported type, which result in producing an inaccurate data model.
In this article, you will learn how to find out the version of your MySQL installation. Try to follow the steps get the information needed, and select the proper version range in the database configuration window of VP-UML. Read more
Visual Paradigm supports data modeling with ERD and a set of engineering features like the reverse engineering and generation of database. The features are related with each other. For example, you may generate a database from physical ERD. In order to construct a data model that helps you build a database properly, you need to name the entities and their columns properly. Besides, data types of columns should be well-considered. Just to take the type ‘char’ example, there are quite a number of similar types like varchar, varchar2, nvarchar, etc. If a wrong type is chosen for any column, you may get data corruption or result in data lost.
When a development team is developing a system that requires accessing a database, it is a common practice to setup local databases on each of the development environment and populate them with all the required schema of the system so that developers can develop and test the function they implement with test data in their own database, rather than working with actual data with production database.
Complex workflow design makes it difficult for readers to get into the process flow. If flow elements in process diagram can be categorized into meaningful activity groups, you may want to group them as sub-processes and show their detail at lower-level process diagrams. Besides, by moving detailed flow to sub-diagram also helps maintain a consistent leveling of context a business process diagram try to present. In this article, you will see how to group several BPMN tasks into a sub-process. To help you understand the principle easier, a simple example will be used.
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When your project is simple, you are able to express all of the design ideas with just a few diagrams. The diagrams are simple and self-explanatory. Each of them represents a distinct design idea and there is no overlapping between diagrams.
When you are dealing with a complex project, you may need to draw multiple diagrams to represent different contexts. You need to borrow shapes from a diagram to make them appear in other diagrams (i.e. contexts). In fact, this is extremely common when modeling with class diagram and business process diagram. Take UML class diagram as an example, there may be a domain diagram that presents all the entity classes and, another diagram that presents the associations and dependencies between a specific controller class and its related entity classes. So in this case, both diagrams contain the same set of entity classes.
Instead of re-creating those classes again and again in different diagrams, Visual Paradigm allows you to “re-use” them. Through simple copy and paste (Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V), you can easily copy a shape from one diagram to another. Each shape is formally known as a “view”. So with this, you can create multiple views for a model element in representing different contexts. Changes made on a shape are all synchronized to other instances that appear in other diagrams without extra effort. This is great, but there is a drawback though.
Association is one of the key elements for constructing class model. It is not just a line relating 2 classes but also carrying lots of information describing their relationship. Giving a meaningful name to the association would help to make it easier to understand. Visual Paradigm allows you to show and hide the name of the association in a flexible way. Read more
When your team is composed of people with different roles and authorities, you may want to have control over their actions in the modeling tool, to prevent them from making undesired changes. For example, while it is reasonable for a software architect to build class models, it is not reasonable for him to restructure any model developed, through the refactor feature. With VP Server, administrator is allowed configure the access rights of features for members or member groups. For example, by turning off the “manage referenced project” permissions for a member, he/she won’t be able to add and remove referenced project. In this article, you will see how to configure client permission when creating and editing a member.
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Commit sends your local changes to server, while update grabs from server the latest changes made by your teammates. Frequent committing and updating help ensure that people in your team are all working on the latest and common project data. If you have a large number of projects in your workspace, the mass commit and mass update function are particularly helpful. They can save you time by committing or updating all projects in workspace in one go, rather than to do it project by project. In this article, you will learn how to commit and update multiple projects at one time. Note that the techniques to cover apply to any of the supported concurrent versioning systems: Visual Paradigm Teamwork Server, SVN, CVS, Perforce, ClearCase.
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Data Object representing the data being used or updated in your Business Process Diagram. This piece of data can be a physical document, or information in electronic form. It didn’t have any direct affect to the Sequence or Message Flows in the process model, but providing information about what the flow does. You can specify the Data Object meaning a single piece of data, or a collection of data. In this article we will show you how to specify the Data Object to be a collection in Visual Paradigm.
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