We have to document the Entity-Relationship of a system based on AREV (with extensive use of @vm, @svm, @tm and @stm).

Is there any utility (similar to ERwin) able to create the diagram directly from dictionaries?

Any comments will be appreciated.

Wilhelm

We are not aware of any commercially available utilities to do this. A product called InfoModeler grew out of such an attempt in the early Nineties but it went down another route. It is now just a standard modeling package. We use this to create the ERDs themselves from documentation we create from the system itself. The problem is that dictionaries themselves are not enough to create the ERD as referential integrity rules which impact upon primary/foreign key relationships can also be contained in indexes and/or data entry screens.

The Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

Something I've been waving my arms in the air about since ARev 1.0…grumble grumble…

"…. We use this to create the ERDs themselves from documentation we create from the system itself ….."

Putting referential integrity aside: How do you tie together the dictionaries and what do you do with files that have no dictionaries?

Or do you just create a text file with the basic items like entities & attributes and import it to the modeling package, where you add relationships, business rules and everything else?

TIA

Wilhelm

We use printed reports to create the table structure manually. Most packages will import an Access table so you could import data definitions into Access then use this to reverse engineer the diagram. Frankly we don't bother as creating the table structures is the least of the work.

The Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

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