Projects in erwin Data Modeler

Projects in erwin Data Modeler helps you to bring all the database models involved in your application development together. Using projects, you can save and manage these models in a single location in your storage directory. The Project Explorer in erwin DM also enables you to open and load these models directly from a common explorer pane in the application, eliminating the need to load and work on them separately.

In projects, models are ordered in a hierarchical basis. You can create multiple child models from existing parent models in the project. You can choose whether these child models inherit the properties of their parent or start from a completely new ER diagram. Each model in the project can be worked on individually, with changes introduced exclusively to each other. However, erwin DM also lets you sync the changes in a parent model with all its child models, if needed. This helps to reduce the effort required to manually make the changes in all applicable models.

You can create new models as you require directly into the project. Projects also enable you to import and work on existing models that are stored in multiple locations. For example, using the Open Models function in the Project Explorer, you can import models from your local storage and erwin Mart Portal. Once they are imported, a copy of each model at the time of import is saved to your specified project location. When you start working on the project, your changes are applied to these imported copies.

In addition to these methods of adding models, you can also use the Reverse Engineering function in projects to reverse engineer an existing script or database and add the resultant model to the project. Projects also enable you to generate forward engineering scripts for all the models in it. Furthermore, you can filter and customize the list of models to forward engineer, as you require.

Projects can be saved as a single directory to any of your preferred location. You can save them to your local storage any time or upload the project files to a Mart catalog. When you save a project, all the models and their metadata are stored inside the specified project directory. You can launch the project from this storage directory using the project file, or individually open a model file saved in the project folders.