The ORM Foundation

My diagram has gotten way too big and I'm trying to reduce the complexity while I'm working. For example, suppose I've got an Entity called Person and a bunch of roles related to Contact Information and a bunch of roles related to Biographical Information. I might want to temporarily delete all the roles related to Contact Information so I can just foucs on Biographical Information. Or maybe there is a subtype and I want to just foucs on that. To do this, I delete a bunch of roles and objects from the diagram but not from the underlying model. But how do I add those roles back to the diagram to get the complete picture? I'd like to be able to right-click on an object and choose an option to "Show all related" and this would add back to the diagram any missing roles, subtypes, supertypes, contraints, etc. Another way to handle this is to create a new Diagram page and drag a single object onto it. But this seems to just drop the single object and none of its related roles, subtypes, etc. I was thinking I could multi-select a bunch of stuff from the Model Browser but this isn't supported. By the way, I added my ORM document to a Solution folder - I'm not using any of the code generation. To get the complete picture of an object I tried to use the "Diagram Spy" window but it never shows anything. I get an error message in the window that says "An ORM Designer document must be active."

The 'ORM Context Window' was designed to do this, although this is basically a proof-of-concept solution with lousy layout and some major performance issues. I'd recommend leaving it at generation 1 or 2. Don't try 3 on a large model unless you save first.

The Verbalization Browser lists all fact types that use the selected object type as a role player.

The diagram spy will show items if you choose 'Select in Diagram Spy' with an item selected in the document window, or click a hyperlinked item in the Verbalization Browser. This is discussed in the 'General Use' section of the readme (items 5 and 6). This section also has some other pointers, such as how to get object type shapes for a fact type without displayed role players. However, the diagram spy just shows shapes as they appear on existing diagrams. It will not show all related shapes.

-Matt

Note that the Context Window won't show all constraints attached to roles of the object types it displays, even when all relevant roles are displayed. I forget which constraint types are missed, but I seem to recall that exclusion constraints are in this class.. unless Matt has fixed that bug since I reported it last December.

I was using this to build a diagram with all elements of a single model in one place, so that selecting all caused all verbalisations for the whole model to appear in the verbalisation browser. If Matt suggested an alternate way of getting the verbalisations for an entire model, I forget what it was.