Positioning the attributes

Submitted by ikom on 30 November 2008 - 11:32am

hi,
first of all i wanna say that you´re project is really cool, especially for mac-users. in my school we have to build erm-diagrams and there´s no freeware software for mac available. so it´s an amazing idea to manage this kind of things online!

everything is working very nice, but there´s one thing i don´t like.

when you create some entities with attributes and you want to make some relationsships after that, the foreign key is alway on the bottom. it would look much better if the foreign key is directly under the ID. so if you wanna do that you have to think first of all about the releationships before you start building your diagram. some people might do that, but that´s not my workflow. i always create the entities with the attributes first and then i think about the releationships.

it would be pretty cool if you add some arrows to put the attributes on the position you want them to be.
i hope you understand what i mean .. i know that my english is pretty bad.

cya

Comments

Welcome Mac user!

Submitted by karl on 1 December 2008 - 4:06am.

ikom:

thanks for your comment. Repositioning of attributes inside an entity sounds cool, we will put your request through to our development team for further study.

please feel free to let us know if you have any other ideas on how to improve SchemaBank. Or any bugs / usability problems you encountered.

cheers,

karl

Positioning the attributes

Submitted by muunkky on 24 April 2009 - 3:30pm.

I'm a very visual person and things like attribute positioning are important for me when I model. Perhaps this could be taken to another level by not only allowing repositioning, but also grouping of attributes with color coordinated shading.

For example:
Primary Keys - black with white font
Foreign keys - dk.gray with white font
Secondary foreign keys - lt.gray with white font
User inputs - blue with white font
Calculated values - pink with black font
List items - White with black font

this is also a great suggestion...

Submitted by karl on 27 April 2009 - 5:44pm.

thanks!

I'd like to second these

Submitted by getloaded on 18 August 2009 - 2:22pm.

I'd like to second these suggestions. Perhaps you could give a drop-down box that has font and background color for each attribute so that we could set them. Also, if you could expose the attribute order number so that we could change it (thereby moving attributes up or down) then that would be a huge help.

Repositioning sounds cool

Submitted by luis on 24 December 2009 - 5:28pm.

Cool Tool, great for OpenSource projects.

My vote for Repositioning of attributes inside an entity.

TIA.

We need your input

Submitted by karl on 2 March 2010 - 3:15am.

Do you want the table structure at the db server changes as well? Or just the visual order in the ERD diagram?

For the latter option, it may involve dropping and recreating the columns in questions; especially for the case of PostgreSQL.

as noted in the other post,

Submitted by muunkky on 7 April 2010 - 6:04pm.

as noted in the other post, visual is fine for me personally.