Double sided arrow visio

Once you have learned how to create a Visio Crow’s Foot ERD, you will be suffi ciently

familiar with the basic Visio Professional software features to experiment on your own with

other modeling and diagramming options. You will also learn how to insert text into the Visio

diagram to document features you consider especially important or to simply provide an

explanation of some segment of the ERD.

Note: The screens and instructions in this tutorial are for Microsoft Visio Professional 2010.

If you are using an earlier version of Visio, your screen will vary slightly.

Designing Databases with Visio Professional: A Tutorial

Microsoft Visio Professional is a powerful database design and modeling tool. The Visio software has so many features that it is impossible to demonstrate all of them in this short tutorial. However, you will learn how to:

■ Start Visio Professional.

■ Select the Crow’s Foot entity relationship diagram (ERD) option.

■ Create the entities and defi ne their components.

■ Create the relationships between the entities and defi ne the nature of those relationships.

■ Edit the Crow’s Foot ERDs.

■ Insert text into the design grid and format the text.

A-2 A P P E N D I X A

A.1 Starting Visio Professional

The typical Visio Professional software installation lets you select Visio through the Start, (All) Programs, Microsoft Visio sequence. After the Visio software has been activated, click the Software and Database option to match the screen shown in Figure A.1. (Previously created Visio fi les show up in the Recent Documents header on the right side of the screen.)

FIGURE A.1

The Visio Professional opening screen

SOURCE: Course Technology/Cengage Learning

With the Software and Database selection shown in Figure A.1, select the Database Model Diagram object. Note that your selection results in a highlight around the object. As shown in Figure A.2, you will see the Database Modeling Template description in the right side of your screen.

D E S I G N I N G D A T A B A S E S W I T H V I S I O P R O F E S S I O N A L : A T U T O R I A L A-3

Click the Create button on the right side of the screen as shown in Figure A.2 to begin a new diagram, producing the screen shown in Figure A.3. Because the preference here is for a larger grid than the one shown in Figure A.3, start by selecting the View ribbon at the top of the screen. Click the Zoom option to generate the list of size options. Figure A.4 shows that the 100% option has been selected. When you click the 100% selection and click OK, the grid expands to fi ll the screen.

FIGURE A.2

The database model object selection

SOURCE: Course Technology/Cengage Learning

A-4 A P P E N D I X A

FIGURE A.3

The drawing board

SOURCE: Course Technology/Cengage Learning

D E S I G N I N G D A T A B A S E S W I T H V I S I O P R O F E S S I O N A L : A T U T O R I A L A-5

By selecting the Visio Professional database option and its drawing board, you have completed the preliminary work required to create ERDs. You are now ready to draw the ERDs on the drawing board. You will use the Crow’s Foot option, the same one used to create all of the ERDs in this text.

A.2 Setting The Stage For Creating a Crow’s Foot ERD

To select the Crow’s Foot option, select the Database ribbon, and then click Display Options to display the Database Document Options window shown in Figure A.5. The default selection is the General tab. Note that the default selections in the General tab are Relational and Physical names. Ensure that you have these default options selected.

FIGURE A.4

The drawing board size option

SOURCE: Course Technology/Cengage Learning

A-6 A P P E N D I X A

Select the Relationship tab and click to select the Crow’s feet option as shown in Figure A.6. As you examine the tab, keep in mind that we have not created and named any relationships yet. Therefore, we have not determined how the names will be displayed. You will return to this dialog box later to see the effect of name display options and to demonstrate that you can edit the displays when you are working on the relationships.

FIGURE A.5

The Database Document Options window

SOURCE: Course Technology/Cengage Learning

D E S I G N I N G D A T A B A S E S W I T H V I S I O P R O F E S S I O N A L : A T U T O R I A L A-7

Next, select the Table tab in the Database Document Options dialog box, as shown in Figure A.7. Make sure that the check boxes are marked as shown here, and then click the OK button to begin creating Crow’s Foot ERDs.

FIGURE A.6

The Database Document Options, Relationship tab

SOURCE: Course Technology/Cengage Learning

FIGURE A.7

The Database Document Options, Table tab

SOURCE: Course Technology/Cengage Learning

A-8 A P P E N D I X A

A.2.1 The Business Rules

To illustrate the development of the Visio Professional’s Crow’s ERD, you will create a simple design based on the following business rules:

1. A course can generate many classes.

2. Each class is generated by a course.

3. A course may or may not generate a class.

Note that a class has been defi ned as a section of a course. That defi nition refl ects the real world’s use of the labels class and course. Students have a class schedule rather than a section schedule. The catalog that lists all of the courses offered by a department is called a course catalog. Some courses are not taught each semester, so they may not gener- ate a class during any given semester.

A.3 Creating an Entity

Now that you have some idea of the proposed design components, let’s create the fi rst entity for the design. Click the Entity object shown in Figure A.8. (It is circled in the fi gure.) Drag the Entity object to the grid and then drop it. That action will produce the Table1 object shown in the grid in Figure A.8. (The 1 in the Table1 label indicates that this is the fi rst entity object to be placed on the grid.) Note that the entity object is shown as a table.