The ORM Foundation

Problem with Toolbox on Windows 7 workstation

mnnoon — Sun, 19 May 2013 21:36:47 GMT

On a clients machine they have my login setup up as a regular non-admin user and I asked the local admin to install the Norma tool from his acct. I installed update 2 in vs2012 from the admin acct as well and everything works great except the toolbox for an orm model.

I have the same configuration on my home computer except its on a Windows 8 machine. Back on the clients workstation however the toolbox simply causes the visual studio instance to crash immediately. On my logon session I have access to all the models and I can see changes through TFS that I made at home, but I can't seem to use the tool box for anything including constraints or notes. The act of clicking anywhere in the orm toolbox and then moving the mouse cursor over the orm model instantly causes the visual studio session to crash on the client workstation.

I'm guessing that some sort of process in Visual Studio 2012 is trying to store temporary data into the commons folder when a new object is created using the toolbox and since I have non-admin access it hits a security exception of some sort which causes it to crash. The fact editor does not cause this problem however and I can save everything to my documents folder fine by avoiding the toolbox.

Tutorial #5

chrobiso — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:59:43 GMT

Firstly, let me say that the more that I play with NORMA, the more fascinated I become. The tutorials are clearly written, well paced, and cover an impressive range of the tool's features.

I have come across a very few situations where what I experience - using VS 2010 with Release 17 - doesn't exactly match the behavior described in the tutorials. I would like to know whether my results are typical or if I am missing something. It may simply be a version issue since the tutorials were written before the VS 2010 edition was developed.

On page 22 of the Lab5 tutorial it states that clicking a predicate in the Verbalizer window will select that predicate in the Diagram Spy. I don't experience this behavior - clicking the hyperlink does nothing. I can of course still access the predicate's Properties by locating it manually in one of the diagrams, I just can't use the Verbalizer as a shortcut to locating the predicate.

This is far and away the most significant discrepancy between the tutorials and my experience. The rest are trivial things that seem to suggest that a tutorial's screen shots were based on a more robust model than the one that is being built. For example, on page 23 of the same tutorial, the Gender entity appears shadowed even though this is the first reference of that entity in this lab.

All in all, impressive support for an impressive and FREE tool: thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU!

orm notations misunderstanding

rolemo — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:58:26 GMT

hi,

well its my first visit here, i must say that the forum seems knid of a lonely place...

anyway, what i wa nted to ask about re the uniqness arrows. you know, the small ones just abouve the facts box. thing is i cant understand why not to use the UML [0...1], [1...*] etc. theseare much more precisr and easier to follow.

thanks

I have an ApprovalInfo table with approval criteria in other tables.

mnnoon — Fri, 10 May 2013 18:02:18 GMT

I'm looking for best practice in orm by asking Is there a good way in orm to check that all the required fields for the approval process (final stage for approval) is completed and ready to go? I have credit card account authorization tables and one of the last tables that gets populated is an approval table which has the date the account was approved and who approved it. So when I hit approved, it now checks that all the tables and required fields for the approval process are correctly filled with appropriate data. I'm thinking that maybe a trigger on the approval should be checked which then creates a transaction to see if all mandatory fields have been completed. This includes on sub tables such to check for required fields.

Note: I have a similar dilimea for changing an approved account. Closing an approved account and changing an approved account to a declined state or to some other state. I'm using a status field to track these mode changes.

Also I noticed someone was interested in a draft mode which makes sense because its not mandatory in the initial stage of the account creation b/c operators will constantly make changes or retrieve new information until its ready for final approval.

Thank you,

Marc Noon

Feature Request: Common Fact Type Patterns from the toolbox

OrionB — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 18:44:27 GMT

When using the NORMA tool, I often find myself doing the same action many times: Dragging a fact type from the tool box, adding a constraint to make it one-to-many, and adding the predicate reading. (often a simple has/is for)

Might it be possible to add to the toolbox a binary fact type that comes with the constraint already on it? e.g. the ability drag a one-to-many with a has/is for predicate text out of the toolbox? Is this something I already have the ability to do, but just don't yet know how?

ORM Dictionary: How to organise your ORM files

Tom Leeman — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 15:05:21 GMT

I’ve been meaning to post this on the forums for a while now, but I’ve just never got round to it. This isn’t actually an open-source model but I didn’t know where else to put this forum post.

Anyway, onto what ORM Dictionary actually is. If you simply create a new object role modelling file or a modelling project and place it in a folder somewhere on your hard drive each time you create an ORM, you quickly find that your ORM files become disorganised, and therefore hard to keep track of.

Instead, if you create a single C# Visual Studio console application (or any kind of Visual Studio Project), you can simply place your existing, or new object role models into the projects solution. The benefit of this is that all your ORM files will appear under the Solution Explorer in Visual Studio, under a single project. This helps to organise your ORM files and provide quick and easy access to all of your ORM files from within Visual Studio – and also enables you to load all of your files at once if you create a .sln file for your project.

A further benefit of this approach is that because all of your ORM files are under a console application, you can click on the ORM file in the Solution Explorer and generate the DDL for your file directly. This is instead of having to create a new project each time you want to generate DDL, which I find is a bit of an inconvenience.

If that didn’t make any sense, then I’ve also added a step-by-step process of how to make the ‘ORM Dictionary’ in Visual Studio 2010 below.

1. Create a new Console Application project in Visual Studio
2. Give the project a nice, memorable name
3. In the Solution Explorer right click on your projects name then go to Add > Existing Item…
4. Select an ORM file you’ve created that you want to attach to the project
5. Repeat steps 3-4 for all your ORM files
6. Now you have easy access to all your ORM files, and can create new ORM directly by right clicking on the project name in the Solution Explorer and selecting Add > New Item

Also, once finished, your projects solution should like something similar to this…
http://i48.tinypic.com/17xwys.png

I presume some of you already organise your ORMs like this, but for those of you who don’t, I definitely think it’s worth it :)

Example: Using Python with an Access database

Ken Evans — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:43:10 GMT

This is a copy of the code in a post made by Tom Smith in the Coursera course."An Introduction to Interactive Programming with Python"

The Google pyodbc link is very informative.

A future post will show how to do a similar thing with SQL Server.

Thanks Tom.
============

# Using Python module pyodbc to open *.mdb or *.accdb Access database files

# pyodbc database interface
# See code.google.com/p/pyodbc/
# See http://code.google.com/p/pyodbc/wiki/GettingStarted
import pyodbc

FullPathDbFile = 'C:\\MyDbFile.accdb'
SQL = 'SELECT * FROM MyDbTableName ORDER BY FieldName_DataEntryTime;'
print 'Open database file: %s' % FullPathDbFile
OdbcConnect = 'DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb, *.accdb)};DBQ=' + FullPathDbFile
conn = pyodbc.connect(OdbcConnect)
cursor = conn.cursor()

for DbRow in cursor.execute(SQL): # cursors are iterable
     DataA = DbRow.FieldName_A # FieldName_A is a field/record name inside the database table
     DataB = DbRow.FieldName_B
     # ... etc., extract and use items read from database

The prospects of ORM Lite

pcarbonn — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:48:42 GMT

Dear all,

I'd like to hear your thoughts about ORM Lite.

In a previous thread, Fenton asked for a free tool for ORM, to be used by students and enthusiasts. It would certainly help in the adoption of ORM. I would think that ORM Lite could be the answer. It would just need an update of its user interface to make it easier to use (e.g. remove the planning interface) . Better documentation would also help.

I would be curious to know how stable ORM Lite currently is : is it still buggy or production ready ? Is it complete in its coverage of ORM-2 ? Would anybody be willing to help ? (Private responses are welcome)

Thanks in advance,

Pierre C.

Displaying ORM diagrams in a web app

OrionB — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:20:02 GMT

I'm about to create a web app using Visual Studio 2012 that will serve as documentation for another application used to manage an impressive amount of data. My idea is to show, for each and every control panel in the source application:

a picture of the pane (screenshot taken from the app)
a picture of the relevant part of the CDM (ORM notation)
a picture of the relevant part of the LDM (ER notation)
where appropriate some sample data as well.

I have my .orm file in the same solution, and to bring the images over what I've been doing is rightclicking the background of the ORM diagram, selecting 'copy image', pasting into MS paint and saving that off as an image to display.

This means that if I make any change to the ORM diagram, I then have to redo every image that the affected objects are in. (I am very thankful for the functionality that tells me every diagram a particular object is in!) But I do wonder, is there now a way or are there any plans to make this automatic? A way to reference a diagram from my web app and have it come up as a picture without my MS-paint intervention?

Some constraints not verbalized in the html report

Damir Sudarevic — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 19:19:44 GMT

Hi, In the Constraint Validation Report (html) Internal Uniqueness Constraints are often not verbalized (missing); same with Simple Mandatory Constraints. Can not find the pattern, except that the first FactType listed on the report usually have them verbalized, after that they are missing? For Example (model): Accountant(.name) approved Payment(.nr) Accountant(.name) processed Payment(.nr) // both unique and mandatory on the "payment side" Both are properly verbalized in the ORM verbalization Browser, but in the html Constraint Validation Report only the first one has verbalization for Internal Uniqueness Constraint and Simple Mandatory Constraint. Have VS2012 and the latest version of NORMA Any ideas?

Generate an ER Diagram from ORM

rohabhatia — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 06:22:07 GMT

Hi... I am just trying out ORM and i created a small model... I was wondering how i could create an ER diagram directly from it.... I can use the Extension manger and get a relational view but no ER... Help would be appreciated.... Thanks

Is Functional Dependency Theory Practical?

Ken Evans — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 15:03:18 GMT

I am a student on Prof Jennifer Widom's course "Introduction to Databases" which has a section on "Relational Design Theory". This section contains videos that explain the method called "Functional Dependency Theory". (FDT)

Two of the course videos are available on YouTube: Functional Dependencies and Boyce Codd Normal Form

As presented, one starts a functional depencency analysis with something called a "mega relationship" and then one uses FDT to "decompose" the mega-relationship down to Boyce-Codd Normal Form or Fourth Normal Form.

Whilst I am sure that there are many questions related to FDT, here are two questions that come to my mind:

1. Where does the "mega-relation" come from in the first place?
2. What procedure is used to validate the mega-relation with the domain experts before one starts the decomposition process.

If anyone reading this thread has had any experience of using FDT to design a relational schema, it would be good to hear about the advantages and disadvantages.

How to copy objects and facts from one ORM file to another?

a.vanleeuwen — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 16:38:32 GMT

In our company I have managed to successfully introduce NORMA as a sketching tool, even if not directly a model-management tool. However, due the use as a sketching tool, we have a need to copy parts of sketches from one .ORM file to another. Is there any way to cut and paste object types, fact types and constrains, other than directly editing the xml?

Conditional mandatory constraints

Clifford Heath — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 01:54:40 GMT

When modeling, I often find one or more objects which map to records having a significant number of mandatory fields. In constructing a user interface for a user to populate one of these records, there's a need to be able to save the record in a kind of "draft" mode, without all its mandatory fields being yet populated. A similar situation arises with many kinds of state transition, not just from draft to complete, and these can sometimes be handled as subtype transitions. Simply place the conditionally-mandatory roles on a subtype, so that the supertype instance acquires a subtype instance dynamically after those roles are filled. However, this subtype approach relies on natural domain terminology to name the supertype, and doesn't work where some but not all mandatories are provided in one go.

But back to the draft situation, it's possible to add a unary "is draft", and then to define join mandatory constraints (using NORMA Pro, or using CQL) saying that the role is mandatory only if the object is not a draft. These constraints should get mapped as CHECK constraints (CHECK(field is not null or is_draft = true). However it's enough of a nuisance and is common enough to want to streamline it a bit in the modeling languages.

When developing applications using Ruby on Rails, it's common practise to simply omit the mandatory constraints, and to handle these validations in the Rails "model" (application code for the record type), but I prefer to enforce constraints in the DBMS where possible

How do other people handle this type of constraint?

Do joins make the most sense when determining states.

mnnoon — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 19:38:34 GMT

Hi, I've been trying to put joins into a case statement in SQL. The current version of SQL code has joins between a state rates table and several other tables that have states in them. But since there is an agreed upon order to how these rates are applied applied depending on which state a table is from, I have been having trouble moving this to a case statement.

My questions are there situation that are more suited for joins than to case statements in SQL Server? And which one is more efficient? (Details below)

Here is a banking example on which fee should be applied:

State of Residence, Banking State, Insurance State, License State, Highschool state

each of these states are in a separate table, and there is a fee table that has each state listed with its associated fee.

So I have matrix:

Case #

Residense State Length=2

Banking State Length=2

Insurance State Length=2

Drivers License State Length=2

Highschool State Length=2

TRUE

n/a

FALSE

TRUE

n/a

FALSE

TRUE

n/a

FALSE

TRUE

n/a

FALSE

TRUE

So my join would look have to match each case. I'm using empty string '' for situation where that information was not provided and NULL are never allowed in this model. The constraint is that there can only be either two characters A-Z and must be listed in StateList table, or an empty string. Since each of the states above are in a separate table, I need to choose the rate from the above matrix. Where each item is not n/a it must be a binary AND with each state.

STATE PENALTY TABLE looks like this:

STATE PENALTY ASSESSED

AK $12.95

AL $13.95

...

There is also a state called NA which stands for Not Applicable with a penalty of $1.00.

In the above case if all states are empty string, then a penalty of $1.00 is assessed.

select sp.State, sp.Penalty Assessed from Residence as r inner join Banking as b inner join Insurance as i inner join DriversLicense as d inner join HighSchool as h inner join StatePenalty as sp

on r.State = sp.State -- Case 1

or r.State = '' and b.State = sp.State -- Case 2

or r.State = '' and b.State = '' and I.State = sp.State -- Case 3

or r.State = '' and b.State = '' and I.State = '' and d.Sate = sp.State -- case 4

or r.State = '' and b.State = '' and I.State = '' and d.State = '' and h.State = sp.State - case 5

or r.State = '' and b.State = '' and I.State = '' and d.State = '' and h.State = '' and sp.State = NA - case 5

Thanks,

Marc

How to add 'greater than' operator to an integer

Tom Leeman — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 08:40:04 GMT

I know this should be really simple - but I can't figure out how to add a 'greater than' value range to an integer to ensure that it's value is at least 0.

C# .Net Express edition...

exahertz — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 19:50:57 GMT

Are "Express" additions of the VS 2010 IDE components supported by NORMA?

Usage of 'Group' in NORMA

jacobvos — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 06:08:15 GMT

I read two posts about the usage of 'Group' in NORMA. I get the idea it has a meaning when creating a database schema from a conceptual model. Is that correct? So it does not have a meaning on conceptual level?

Database Driven Forum Design

Ken Evans — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 19:59:05 GMT

The database course currently being run by Professor Jennifer Widom of Stanford University (CA) uses the Piazza Forum for student interactions.

I'm presently enrolled on this excellent course and am aware that several students have been discussing the topic of forum design.

I posted this message as a simple example of the way ORM Foundation forum works. If anyone wants to comment, please feel free to do so.

New data types for NORMA

Tom Leeman — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 20:32:07 GMT

Would it be possible to add in additional data types into NORMA and also to update the data type which they are converted to during the ddl generation (specifically for SQL Server)?

For example, for date data-types we currently have 'Temporal: Auto Timestamp', 'Temporal: Date' and 'Temporal: Date & Time'. However when the ddl is generated for SQL server all three data types map to the same SQL Server data-type 'datetime'.

In SQL Server 2012 there are several date/time datatypes; date, datetime, datetime2, datetimeoffset, time, smalldatetime. It would be great if NORMA has the capability to generate ddl which supported these additional datatypes in addition to other datatypes such as timestamp (rowversion in previous version of SQL Server) etc

If the process to include this functionality isn't too complicated I would be willing to attempt to add this in myself or to work with someone else to bring this functionality into NORMA :)

Difference between 'InformalDescription' and 'Note'

jacobvos — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 05:53:55 GMT

What is the intended difference in use between the fields 'InformalDescription' and 'Note'? Is the first field meant to give an informal verbalization and not more than that, and the second field to provide any additional comments?

Norma for vs2012

robbyzahm — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 22:43:36 GMT

Is their a norma tool for visual studio 2012?

Wrap long fact type reading in diagram

jacobvos — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 22:25:15 GMT

At a fact type may be displayed a long reading, or maybe two (also a reverse reading. Is there a way to wrap the text (have it on two or more lines)?

Possibility to report to / communicate with stakeholders

jacobvos — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 22:05:17 GMT

I am glad NORMA is a tool that sticks to the theory of fact modeling. So modeling a UoD can be done well.

But then I want to present the model to stakeholders. Nice should be an HTML-export in which diagrams are shown, and shapes on diagrams are clickable to show information about object types and fact types. Entity types are shown in a list, but only the ones displayed on a certain diagram are shown (a model might contain 10 diagrams).

However the HTML-export doesn't show diagrams. It shows a 'simple' list of object types (for example entity types and value types near each other). It cannot be used to let a model be browsed by a business user.

I read a post about an online diagram viewer. But that also doesn't offer a good structure for communicating.

I also found that a diagram can be copied/pasted, but alas not be easily saved as a .png file.

And I also didn't find (yet) a way to export all the verbalizations.

Did I overlook reporting possibilities? Are there concrete plans to improve reporting? I'd also like to know how other modelers do their communication with business stakeholders.

Regards,
Jacob

Translation possible of 'keywords'?

jacobvos — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 12:41:20 GMT

Hello,

I am investigating whether I can use NORMA as tool to define a conceptual datamodel for a customer. Though we Dutch people do speak some words English ;-), I cannot offer this to the employees concerned.

So my question is: can 'keywords' like 'each', 'is a' , 'holds' and so on be translated? (Probably at least this isn't easy because order of words can be different, and also verbal form can vary.)

Kind regards,
Jacob Vos