Posts

How to Create Connectors with Turning Points using Open API

Visual Paradigm’s Open API allows you to create all kind of our supported connectors in diagram. They are not necessary to be in simple straight line form. You can create complex connectors with multiple turning points just like those you created in diagram with your mouse. This article will teach you how to create connectors with turning points using Open API. Read more

How to Create Containment Relationship with API

Open API not only allows you access the model data within the project, but also creating new model elements and connector. This is not only for standard connectors such as association, but also relationships such as containment. This article will show you how to create containment relationship using Open API. Read more

Working with Master View

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.

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What to do If You Cannot Resize Shapes in a Diagram

Sometimes when you reopen your project and try to edit the diagram, you find that the shapes in your diagram are not resizable. This probably caused by you have turned on the auto-fit size option of your diagram. This could be caused by you accidentally turned on this option, or your other team member turned it on when they editing the same diagram in teamwork environment. By turn on this option, all the shapes in your diagram will be fitted its size automatically, thus, all the resize points around the shape will be disabled. Read more

Why the modification on a newly created element will reflect to an existing model element?

Visual Paradigm’s modeling tools are running in share model basis. This is meaning that a single model element can appear on different diagrams, or even on the same diagram multiple times (we call it the “views”). Changing the model element on one of the view will automatically reflected to other views. But sometimes you can may found that when you make changes on a new model element, changes also applied to other elements in your project, which is not what you looking for. There are 2 possibilities for this problem to be happen: Read more