Contributed Models

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 :)

IT Management ORM data model PDF

rccorm — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:57:55 GMT

The Acrobat PDF version of the IT Management ORM data model (Open Source Model posted in this site's Library) does not display any of the graphic models. Should I be using a special "plug-in" for Adobe to display these? Any help is much appreciated. Thank you.

http://www.ormfoundation.org/files/folders/it_management/entry2689.aspx

How to post a model

JimLudden — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:25:40 GMT

I wanted to post a model of "IT Management", but do not have permission to upload files. Can you give pointers about the mechanism for contributing to this forum that would include:

where to put the file
how to upload the file
how to link to that file from the forum posting

Getting back to ORMs - Need help

Stephen Hampton — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:37:52 GMT

Hi, I'm new to the forums here. I haven't done any ORMs for 10 years and I need to get back into it. I'm doing up an ORM that encompasses employee details, laptop details, and all software and accessories. I've done up a "first draft" in VisioModeler but I'm sure I've missed a lot of required constraints. Is there anyway I can upload the file so someone could check it out for me? Thanks

Talent Agency - CQL

Ken Evans — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:51:39 GMT

Clifford's conversion of Tyler's "Talent Agency" model is a good example of what can be done with an ORM file.

However, I'm left wondering how to correctly read the file?
When I downloaded Clifford's CQL file of Tyler's "Talent Agency", the file opened in notepad by default! (quite a mess)
When I opened it in Word, I saw a list of XML like statements. (much more helpful)

So right now I have two questions:
1: What editor should I use to open the file?
2: How would I use the file? (i.e. in what part of the development process?)

Clifford, can you help here?

Ken

Common Models

Tyler Young — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:17:22 GMT

First of all, thanks to Ken for setting up this new section of the boards!

In my part time I enjoy making websites, and very often the projects I want to do are for specialized domains. Over the years I've done various (amateur) models of climate zones, a talent agency, message boards, microarrays for proteomic expression, and numerous other things. Often, the projects have overlapping areas. While NORMA doesn't yet support the combining of separate models, it might be of value to the community to share our experiences and some of the commonly used models that we've come up with.

To start us out I'll be posting several models that I've worked on over the years. The search through my archives just finished, and it looks like I've made a total of 81 models. Go me! Most of them are trivial bits of fluff, but we can look at them as a starting point until other people want to share too. In the meantime, they're available for discussion and anyone is free to download and modify as they see fit. All I ask is that you upload the results of your modification so that we can grow as a community. Surely there's some sort of open-source license that's appropriate for this... any suggestions? Once I figure that out, consider them all released under that license. :)

So join the fun! Post pieces of models that you commonly use, and let's start working on a community library that we can all benefit from!

Talent Agency

Tyler Young — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:10:30 GMT

I just posted the Talent Agency model in the OSM section of the Library. The details document contains screen shots of all the pages, as well as the logical model and the SQL. The NORMA model is also available.

I'll post other models as I create their respective documentation, but for now at least the ball is rolling. You'll notice that several of the areas that are not specific to the talent agency domain are modeled quite thin. This is not a production system, so there may be glaring logical errors. Please feel free to discuss it, tear it apart, and come up with something better.

One of the goals of posting this model is to demonstrate the need for open-source, reusable models that allow us to focus on our core domains. I would have saved hours of work by not modeling the address and invoice sections from scratch.

This model was created when I was not employed by any talent agency, and I am the owner of it. I hereby release it under the GPLv3 open source license.