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This topic is for application designers who need to define data structures, including streams, attributes, properties and relationships.

ERD Fundamentals

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Overview

PhixFlow  Entity- Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) define the logical structure of the data in your application. "Entities" represent the things in the world that you want to represent as data. Defining the data for your application is considered the first step in your design.

The

following example shows an ERD for a school. The school has entities: departments, teachers, students, classrooms and so on. All these entities are represented as tables and the lines connecting them show their relationships to one another. We can see from this a School Department has many Class Rooms and Teachers. This is covered in more detail in Understanding ERDs and Views

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ERD Page

ERD Window Layout

Here is a simplified view of the ERD editor.window:

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  1. The Toolbar toolbar provides ERD specific options, such as displaying the available table that can be added data tables that you can add to your ERD and options for creating a new tablescreen for your data.
  2. The Repository browser, can list all of the available tables in your application and any associated packages. Select Tables from the toolbar to display this area. 
  3. The Canvas area where the ERD will be configured. Tables can be added by:
  4. Dragging Table from the create menu of the toolbar onto the canvas.
  5. Clicking Tables from the list menu of the toolbar and dragging a  
  6. On the toolbar, click
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     to list all available tables in the r
    epository pane on the right. 
  7. The main part of the window is the canvas, where you create the ERD.
    • To add a new table, from the toolbar, drag the 
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       icon
       onto the canvas.
    • To add an existing table, on the toolbar, click 
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      . PhixFlow lists the available tables in the repository. Drag
       a table from the repository onto the canvas.
    Excel documents can be dragged
    • To add an Excel or CSV spreadsheet, drag it directly onto the canvas
    and will be imported automatically
    • . PhixFlow imports the data and uses it to create a new table.
  8. The Tables tables and Relationships, are displayed on the canvas. A Table Shows the relationships between them.
    • A table is represented as a box, containing a list of all of the attributes it contains
    within it
    • and
    the
    • their associated data type.
    • A
    relationship between two tables is displayed as a line connecting
    • line connecting tables represents the relationship between them. The line connects the primary key of one table to a foreign key
    of
    • in a
    second table. This is discussed in more detail in Relationships.

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Already have data?

If you already have data that you wish

ERD Example

The following example shows an ERD for a school. Here the school has entities: departments, teachers, students, classrooms and so on. All these entities are represented as tables and the lines connecting them show their relationships to one another. We can see from this diagram that a School Department has many Class Rooms and Teachers. This example is covered in detail in Understanding ERDs.

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Creating an ERD

  1. On your application's home page, click the Data link to list the existing ERDs. Alternatively you can click the data link from the header bar. 
  2. Click the 
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    button to create a new ERD.

Opening an ERD

  1. On your application's home page, click the Data link to list the existing ERDs. Alternatively you can click the data link from the header bar. 
  2. Double-click any ERD to open it.

Already Have Data?

If you have data to import into PhixFlow, such as a database of customers, you will need to or API, use an Analysis analysis model .Analysis Models will allow to import it. This allows you to configure connectors to access your existing data sources and store the data as tables in PhixFlow's own database. see Importing Data and Importing Data Through an API.

You can also use an analysis model to set up more bulk processes to manipulate large volumes of data before it is presented to your users; see Analysis ModelModels for Batch Processing Data.

What's Next?

Understanding ERDs and Views covers ERDs in more depth to help you design your own ERDs and views to display your data.

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May need more details on options for loading

data

, or a separate concept page.
  • Enter data yourself, by hand (is anyone really going to do this?)
  • Generate test data using input multipliers - no instructions currently
  • Quick-load excel files - not yet implemented
  • Use an analysis model - collectors - currently the only method
  • Use an API to import from a tool - not sure if this is possible yet

    .