Visio does draw the relationships it finds in the Reverse Engineered
database structure. Some databases may have related columns without having
an actual Relationship defined, however. I have reverse engineered from
some SQL 2000 databases where the structure was maintained through trigger
code and other methods, and there were no Relationships to map out at all.
As an overview - when you perform the Reverse Engineering wizard, the
result will be (a) a list of Tables and Views, and Optionally (b) A visual
representation of each table/view dropped on the drawing page, along with
the defined relationships. In the default settings for the page, the
Primary Keys and Foreign Keys will be bolded and have the appropriate
letters (PK or FK) beside the column names. If nothing is defined as
PK/FK, there are no relationships in the model.
Do you see all of the tables that you expect when performing the Reverse
Engineer function? Do you see columns that are marked as Primary Keys (pk)
and Foreign Keys (fk) when you drop the tables onto the page? If you see a
table which should have a Primary Key defined, can you go back into the
original database manager and see the defined relationship, primary keys,
etc.?
What is the database server type / release that you are attempting to map
in Visio? If you are reverse engineering from a SQL server, for instance,
you might look at the database structure from the SQL tools to verify that
there are actual Relationships defined. If you are able to, a good test
would be to create a simple database with two tables that have one
relationship between them, and see if you are able to bring the structure
successfully into Visio.
Barb Way
Product Support - Visio
Microsoft Corporation
[This posting is provided "As Is" with no warranties, and confers no
rights.]
--------------------
Thread-Topic: Reverse Engineering w/ Full Relations?
If you browse to
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio/HA101154771033.aspx
and click on "Show me an example" (it should be visible w/o scrolling
down),
the screenshot shows the arrow relationships that I'd like to have. But
reading through the tutorial, it seems like the only way to get those
arrows
is to manually drag the Relationship stencil onto the page and connect two
tables together.
It seems that a 2007 Visio should be intelligent enough to identify the
foreignkey relationships and lay out the relationship with arrows
automatically on reverse engineer. Is there a neat trick to this or is
there
simply no light at the end of the tunnel? If there indeed is no light at
the
end of the tunnel, perhaps someone can show me another tunnel that there
might be light
Thanks,
Minh
