Improvements for the Domain Model view

Question

9

Hi there, I have some ideas for improving the domain model view

Circuit Mode: Associations can be drawn with multiple 90° angles (like PCB circuits) allowing you to draw them around entities and compact them together instead of having associations sprawling across the domain model from every angle.
Select an Entity to highlight the Entities it’s associated with.
Select an Association to highlight the Entities it’s connected to.
Show attribute types with icons instead of text for readability. It can be difficult to find a specific variable because there’s so much text to read in some cases.
The ability to set entity colors, perhaps an icon, and potentially shapes to help distinguish certain entities from others.
Perhaps “fences”, or an outline that we could use to distinguish groups of entities from others as well.

Thanks. I’ll add more if I think of anything that may be helpful. Feel free to comment with anything you would like to see as well.

asked 2022-05-02

Grant Scritsmier

3 answers

Fabian Recktenwald · Answer 1 · 2022-06-15

Indeed, the domain model editor could use some extra features – I think there are already several similar ideas around.

btw. icons are already available :)

João Lopes · Answer 2 · 2022-05-11

Perfect!
I’d add another improvement sugestion:

The possibility to show/hide entities… Specially when handling complex domain models… seeing all entities at once can be overwhelming and decrease productivity because you spend time fiding entities and connections. Instead, we could have the possibility to hide entities that we do not need to focus at the moment and see only the ones that we need to focus on at the moment. One way to achieve this might be having the possibility to create database diagrams, where you can just drag-and-drop entities inside the diagram.

What do you think of this?

Mathijs Boeren · Answer 3 · 2022-05-02

Mendix should have done this from day one..