Is it possible to create “synonyms” of entities?

Question

PowerAMC/PowerDesigner allows you to create "graphical synonyms" of underlying entities allowing you to place the same entity twice (or more) on a diagram. Each is an instance of the same entity. This is great to pretty-up diagrams when, somehow, an entity must be linked to two others that happen to be on opposite ends of the diagram.

Is there a way to do this in Visio 2010 when using the database modeling template?

Answer 1

There are two ways of doing this:

• Open the Table and Views panel (Database tab, Model Preferences, first tab, "when deleting an object from the diagram" should be on "Ask the user")
• Drag and drop the existing table from that panel onto the diagram

This creates a duplicate of the logical entity and recreates all links (relations) to it. Not immediately useful to clean up the diagram but if you delete the extraneous links and say "No" when it asks if it should also delete the logical elements, then the links disappear visually but the foreign keys remain.

Second method:

• Copy a table from the diagram (CTRL+C)
• In the Home tab, choose to Paste, Special Paste and keep what should be the default mode: Visio diagram data

A copy of the table will appear but it won't be automatically linked to anything visually.

From both points, the duplicates on the diagram are both logically the same entity. This means that if you modify one, the other is also modified. If you link one to something, the other one is also logically linked (foreign keys will be listed in both, though only one may have the visual link).

Note: I'm using the French version of Visio so exact labels mentioned may be different in English. I tried translating to the best of my ability.

Answer 2

If you press the control key then click and drag an entity it will create a synonym.

I have yet to figure out how to remove a specific synonym without deleting all replicas of it.