Month Year Issue

June 1998 Issue: 3

Journal of Conceptual Modeling
www.inconcept.com/jcm

InfoModeler Tips and Tricks: General Tips, Issue Three
by Dr. Anthony Bloesch

Visio's Preferred Customer Edition of InfoModeler includes the prototype tool ActiveQuery. ActiveQuery is an Excel add-in and an ActiveX control that can be used to build English like database queries from your InfoModeler models.
The readme.txt file provides technical notes to help resolve driver, printer, and configuration issues.
To append more objects to the selection: hold down the shift key while lassoing or left-clicking on more objects.
To speed up drawing on slower machines: turn off object shadows (File | Preferences | All Diagrams | Don't Draw Object Shadows).
To break up a crowded diagram page into multiple pages: use the page splitter (Arrange | Auto Split Page).
To split a long object type name into multiple lines: hit the ctrl-enter key while typing in the object type's name.
To name a newly created object type: select the object type and start typing the object type's name. For example, to add an Employee object type, add an object type to the diagram and type Employee.
To control the names of tables and columns automatically generated by InfoModeler: change the appropriate ORM document options (Tools | Document Options…).
In the Fact Editor the free form syntax for facts is: ObjectType, [Object Type], Entity(refmode), ValueType(), forward reading/inverse reading.
To explicitly set the column names that will be generated from an ORM fact: set the role name of the corresponding role.

Dr. Anthony Bloesch is currently Director of Database and Software Modeling Solutions at Visio Corporation. Previously Anthony was Vice-President of Engineering at InfoModelers Inc. and a Research Fellow at the Software Verification Research Center. Anthony has published and researched widely on topics including: conceptual database modeling and querying, software specification languages, object-oriented analysis and design, and automatic diagram layout.