Creating an Entity Relationship Diagram or Data Dictionary

Aptify periodically receives requests from clients for Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) or Data Dictionaries of Aptify.

Entity Relationship Diagrams help a developer visualize Many-to-Many relationships, Ambiguities, Entities, and the relationship between Entities (including the degree of a relationship). However, the dynamic nature of Aptify makes it difficult to provide a static set of ERDs to clients. Since Aptify is a development environment that allows clients to add or edit tables, any standard ERD would quickly become outdated once an organization begins to configure the system.

This topic describes two techniques for creating your own ERDs or create a starting point for a Data Dictionary that will accurately reflect the current configuration of your Aptify installation.

• Creating an ERD Using the Aptify Entity Report
• Creating a Data Dictionary for all Entities Using the Aptify Entity Report Documentation
• Creating an ERD Using SQL Server Management Studio

Creating an ERD Using the Aptify Entity Report

Aptify provides a standard Entity Report with Aptify:

• When run from a view of Entities, this report displays information about all of the entities contains in the view (see next section for details).
• When run from a single Entities record (as described below), the report contains information about that specific entity.

Perform the following steps to run the Aptify Entity report to provide the Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) for a single entity:

1. Open an entity's record from the Entities service.
2. Click the Print icon to launch the Report Wizard.
3. Select Aptify Entity Report Documentation from the list.
   
    
4. Click the Finish button to load the report for the selected entity. The report contains detailed information about the entity's fields, its links to other entities, and its first level sub-types.
   
   

Creating a Data Dictionary for all Entities Using the Aptify Entity Report Documentation

To create a Data Dictionary for all of Aptify, you can run the Aptify Entity Report Documentation report from a view of All Entities. This report will take a while to run depending on the size of your database, so please be patient. 

Follow these steps: 

1. Go to the Entities service. 
2. Open a view of All Entities. 
3. Click the Print icon to launch the Report Wizard, or from Aptify Web, click Actions and then Reports. 
4. Select Aptify Entity Report Documentation from the list.
5. Click the Finish button to load the report for all entities. The report contains detailed information about entity fields, links to other entities, and first level sub-types.

Creating an ERD Using SQL Server Management Studio

You can also create dynamic Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) for Aptify entities using Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio.

Follow these steps:

1. Launch SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the Aptify server as an administrative user.
2. In the Object Explorer, expand the Databases folder to view a list of available databases.
3. Expand the APTIFY database.
   • Right-click the Database Diagrams folder and select New Database Diagram.
     
      
4. Select a table to add the diagram from the list provided. Click Add.
   
    
5. Add additional tables as necessary. Click Close when finish.
   
   • The database diagram loads, displaying information about the table or tables you added.
      
6. To add the tables related to a particular table in the diagram, right-click in a table's caption and select Add Related Tables from the pop-up menu.
   
   
   • SQL Server Management Studio adds the related tables to the diagram and displays the links between them. The figure below illustrates a sample diagram for the Committees entity and its related entities. 
     
      
7. Modify the diagram as necessary and save the results, if desired.