The ORM Foundation

They dropped Visio for Enterprise Architects some time ago. That's not news. I use NORMA. It works pretty well, and supports ORM 2.0.

What reason was given for this new requirement? It sounds like it might be due to ignorance.

Ken, First of all, I apologize: I should have made it clear that I haven't as much as set eyes on VEA in many years, probably not since 2003. I do not miss the necessity of carefully explaining how to avoid the bugs. I've used NORMA for the past several years:I find that my first post in these forums was in March 2008. It just keeps ...

I've been using ORM since the Visio for Enterprise Architect days, and have developed ad-hoc methods for using the tools to maintain a database over the course of its lifetime. I recall that I needed a six-page document to describe how to use VEA to maintain a SQL Server database some time ago. In that case, the documentation needed to ...

Note that on my Windows 7 machine, the registry key is at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\ORM Solutions.

Thanks for this solution. It's working for me so far. This is not the only time I've wanted what in effect is a "design snippet" that I could add to my models and reuse, without introducing new tables. I hadn't thought of using a uniqueness constraint to solve this problem.

Terry, It sounds like you're saying that a value type is an object type which requires no additional explanation. FamilyName "Smith" needs no further explanation. However, Temperature(celsius:) 37 requires specification of the units, and Person(.name) requires a value in order to identify the person. Do I have that right? But I ...

Terry, it helps, all right. It helps blur the distinction between entity and value types even more! What, then, are left as the differences between value and entity types? The fact that a value type is a self-identifying constant, and that an entity is referenced by definite description? But then, I'm sorry, but Temperature 37 degrees Celcius ...

Terry, you say  [quote user="Terry Halpin"] In ORM, I would model Height as an entity type with a unit-based reference mode. For example, Height(cm:) or Height(inches:). Height is based on a unit type or dimension, called "Length". Instances of other entity types (e.g. Width, Distance, Circumference) based on the same ...

Thanks, Matt, that's great progress.