EF4 - Designer enhancements...

Form time to time i have a look what MS is cooking up in EF4.

I came around that post.

What I really like are

4. Multiple Diagrams.

3. Entity Shape Coloring.

1. Association Highlighting.

Especially the cut/copy/past, include related.

"Dear Santa Claus,  can I get that in LS?"

I know that LS has some support for multi diagrams. But the handling of associations across Diagrams make that really hard to use in larger models.

Hmm for what ever resons the link didn't work. Here the url once more:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/efdesign/archive/2010/10/11/entity-designer-improvements-preview.aspx

1. Association highlighting: we already label the associations with their names rather than just their multiplicity, so I don't think we need this -- but if there's a particular feature that does make sense for LightSpeed, call it out and we'll see what we can do!

3. Done!  The next nightly build will include entity shape colouring support.  Look in the property grid for a setting called Shape Color.  We can also add this for value objects and sprocs too if people think it would be useful.  As a future enhancement, I'm thinking we should allow users to automatically colour based on tags, aggregates or inheritance hierarchies -- keen to hear feedback on this!

4. I didn't really understand the request for "cut/copy/paste, include related," but we know there is room for improvement here so we'd be keen to know what specific functionality you'd like to find in your stocking.  Is this specifically to do with multiple diagrams?  Is it that you want to be able to cut or copy an entity and its immediate associations from one diagram and paste that entire graph into another?  (As real entities, not links?)

(As a heads up, we have some constraints around multiple diagrams, which EF4 probably avoids by virtue of not running in VS2008.  But we'll do what we can!)

"[quote user="ivan"]I'm thinking we should allow users to automatically colour based on tags, aggregates or inheritance hierarchies -- keen to hear feedback on this![/quote]

+1

Wounderfull :-)

For sure you are right about the association highlighting – nonsense from my side.

Regarding to the “cut/copy/past and include related”.  Yes it is related to the diagrams.

What I want to have:

• A dictionary of Entity definitions.
• As many diagrams as I want without “any” issues/workarounds what Entities are at a diagram and how they are associated with entities that are not at the diagram. Do you find the manual handling of the entities that are associated with entities at different diagrams usefull?
• Diagrams are only views of parts of my model.
• Let me have the same entity at different diagrams

LS mixes the definition and visual representation of entities into one file and also couple the namespaces definition to it. Splitting the definition and visual representation into different files will lead in a more flexible way how we can create diagrams.
As far as I now is the namespace definition coupled to a diagram with no way to change it an entity per entity base.
Let me define a default namespace at each diagram (for new entities) with the possibility to adjust it at the entity
I am forced to manually maintain association that crosses diagram boundaries (IsLinked Property). It is hard to work with the current solution for larger models.  We currently have a model with 140+ Entities – try that with LS – it is unusable. We stopped early with the migration process to LS and waiting which ORM tool is able to handle larger models. LS looks definitely promising, but there are issues.

Sörnt

I would like to get a comment on my diagramming proposal.
Is it something you would do or are there any issues?

Regards,
Sörnt

In our time zone it has been only one working day since we saw your proposal, and we are quite busy.  We will respond but we have finite resources and have to prioritise.

What you are asking for is quite far-reaching and is not something we could deliver quickly, especially as the next couple of weeks are looking very busy.  However what you describe is very much where we would like to be.  So the answer is yes, it is something we would like to do, but there are design and resourcing issues.

The sweet spot would be to find a smaller piece of work that we could do within the existing framework to address the worst of your pain points.  We really appreciate the feedback and we are keen to improve this area but it is a matter of finding steps that we can deliver within our resource constraints.

[quote user="Soernt"]We currently have a model with 140+ Entities – try that with LS – it is unusable. [/quote]

Whoa. 140 is a lot. Perhaps the better (and fastest) *solution to the problem of large, complex models is to replace a single model file with multiple linked model files. Linked model files work well when your domain consists of a number of distinct subdomains, with relatively few links across subdomain boundaries.

* under Linking LightSpeed Model Files in the chm

[quote user="ivan"]As a future enhancement, I'm thinking we should allow users to automatically colour based on tags, aggregates or inheritance hierarchies -- keen to hear feedback on this![/quote]

I like the idea of being able to automatically color based on inheritance hirarchy. I have different external class base types depending on what the entity does and it would be nice to be able to automatically color entities that inherit from them.

Thank you very much for your answer.
I don't want to "force" you to do anything immediately. I guessed that the things I want to have aren't something that will be done quickly. The point that you want to get in that direction is enough for waiting for it.

I saw your blog post about the new version - that is looking promissing for issues that I had in other areas.

My worst pain point is the manual maintaining of the linked entities (the once that have association that crosses diagram boundaries). When refactoring the model and moving entities to an diagram I want LS to automatically maintain  (insertings and removings) the linked entities accordingly - I guess that something which has less impact?

The current model has got alot of association to standard entities (employees, aircrafts, TCI-Parts there are some more of them). So I don't have a model which I can split up easilly in different diagrams with only one or two entities that cross diagram boundaries.

Sörnt

Any news on this?

I'm afraid not.  We're aware that it remains a pain point for users with larger models, but we don't yet have a solution.  Sorry.