Quality metrics in Entity Relationship Models

General Questions/Discussions
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1

Hi,

Is there any feature in visual paradigm to measure the complexity (even metrics like no of entities, no of attributes etc) of an ER model?

Thanks !

2

Hi Asa,

Thank you for your inquiry. Please try with the feature below, see if that’s what you look for:

  1. Select Help > Show Loaded Models from the main menu
  2. In the window, checked “DBTable” for its count.

Besides, you can also write a plug in to retrieve the information you want. Samples and guides about plug in development can be found here:
https://www.visual-paradigm.com/support/documents/

Hope this helps. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Best regards,
Jick Yeung

3

Hi Jick,

Thank you very much for your reply.

Is this a feature not available in the community edition?

Thanks.

Best Regards,
Asanthika

4

Hi Asa,

Both the ‘Show Loaded Models’ feature and the API support are available in the Community Edition.

Best regards,
Jick Yeung

5

I have also same issue any suggestion for this is so please reply. Thanks in advance.

6

Well, the way I understand, a plugin could be developed for that purpose, until it is added into Visual Paradigm as an integral component. If you would provide a list of features what you would like to have, I might have some time to check what could be done. I wrote at my company plugins for MagicDraw, so I am pretty sure this could be done for VP as well.

7

Hello, I started working on something that might help you, if you are interested, just send me a message and I am happy to show the current status.

8

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. Actually I was trying to find out any tool that can measure the distance between a student model and an instructor’s model (correct answer ! - but this might be subjective in models like ER diagrams). However, that’s when I needed to look into structural metrics which can provide an idea about the quality of an ER diagram. I would say if we can count the following things that would be great.

Number of entities
Number of attributes (can be further divided like number of composite attributes, number of multi-valued attributes )
Number of relationships (can be further divided like number of one-to-many relationships, number of many-to-many relationships )
Number of ISA relationships

This is what I had in my mind.

Thanks again for your interest.

9

I think what you wish is pretty much doable, given we provide a good, formal expression of the quality metrics (basically need an algorithm).

What I am currently working on is adding scripting support to Visual Paradigm. I choose Groovy, which is a very simple language, and spent around two evenings on creating a proof of concept (POC). As you can see there is this dialog, where you can enter your script, and it is executed, and the result is displayed either in a text area or in a list. I would like to add table result support with CSV export as well, and some helper methods for easier model navigation. A full fledged OCL or some SQL would be the greatest but weekend is a little far :smiley:

What do you think?

image

10

This seems really good and seems quite interesting. Would love to see how your final output look like :slight_smile:

11

image

This is the current status. Added the following features:

  • Code editor with syntax highlight
  • Ability to save result into table
  • Export to CSV
  • In case of error it jumps to the errornous line
12

Hello,

I made the plugin open source / publicly available. Feel free to try it out. Looking for feedbacks as well.

13

The latest version is out with documentation and python support as well! Merry Christmas!