The ORM Foundation

In my project I have two models:

A. Retail Management
B. Scheduling

Model A has separate pages for concepts Customer, Item, Order, Sales, etc. It has no concept of Scheduling.
Model B is intended to extend Model A, introducing Scheduling concepts that refer to entities in Model A.

Problem 1.

The same entity appearing on more than one page of Model A is so indicated by shadowing.
As long as I use the fact editor to introduce into a diagram page an entity existing on another page in the same diagram, it is created with shadowing, but this method requires knowledge in advance of some predicate. If I want to introduce that entity (without any roles) by drawing a new EntityType1 from the toolbox and then renaming it, this is not allowed because the name is already in use in the model. Is there a way to do this?


Problem 2.

2.a. Introducing (by either method above) into Model B some entity that exists in Model A in the same project, does not cause it to be shadowed, which indicates to me that Model B is not aware of anything in Model A. Is there a way to make at least one model aware of entities in the other model?

2.b The reason I have the project divided into two models was so that I could generate a database schema from B without generating one for A. 

2.c If the answer to 2.b is 'no' then this strategy is flawed, and I must incorporate both conceptual models into one. In that case, when I generate a DDL, is there some way to suppress DDL generation according to the diagram page or some other method, or must I simply comment out the parts of the DDL output that I don't want to run?

Thank you and best regards,


Joe Shirk

1) You can drag Object Types and Fact Types onto a diagram page from the ORM Model Browser window (which I believe we display near the Solution Explorer window by default).


2) Unfortunately, cross-model / external references is something that we do not yet support. We do consider it a relatively high priority, and hope to have this kind of functionality at least prototyped within the next year or so, after some of the higher priority issues have been addressed.
For the time being, you'll have to do something along the lines of commenting out the portions of the DDL that you don't want.

Thanks! When I get proficient in C# maybe I can help out with that.