Friday, August 21, 2020

Creating Entity Relationship Diagrams

Here is what I did to create an Entity Relationship diagram for a project at work.

Prepare for the solution at this Stack Overflow article

- Download SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) for Visual Studio

- Modify Visual Studio by adding or removing workloads and components

Follow the steps listed in the answer at the SO article. 

- Open Visual Studio

- Create a project or open an existing project (must be Visual Basic, Visual C# project, or Console Application)

- Right-click the project and choose Add -> New Item…

- Under Visual C# Items select “Data”

- Select the template “ADO.NET Entity Data Model”

- Give it a name and click “Add”

- Select “Generate from database” or “Empty model”

- If “Generate from database” selected enter connection info, choose the database objects and done!

The model is stored as a “.edmx” file. 

- In the visual representation of the edmx file in Visual Studio, arrange the entities so that the relationships are easy to follow.

- Right click in the edmx file and choose Diagram -> Export as image. Save the image. 

No comments: