America's Next Top (ER) Model: Plowed!

I've been doing a lot of modeling lately, and it's starting to affect my personal life.  In today's article, I'll explore the personal story of how the stress of modeling found me getting plowed every day, and how I managed to stop.

A Day in the Life of a Model
As I mentioned, I'm do a lot of data modelling these days.  My team uses Visio for all of our ER diagrams.  It works pretty well, and with the help of a free plug-in from Orthogonal, we can generate our initial DDL scripts right from the diagram.

Here's where the stress of modeling starts:

I have a nice ER diagram, all organized in a visually pleasing way:

.. and then I go to move one of the entities a little bit, and that's when it happens:

A whole bunch of other entities scatter out of the way, often landing outside the page borders.  Rounding up each of these stray sheep typically results in a few more sheep wandering off in random directions, and it's a long, frustrating day on the ranch.

I'm not even sure how to begin Googling, because there isn't a good word for the behavior.  I tried things like "visio object repel" or "visio objects rearrange" or "visio sucks sucks sucks sucks er diagrams".  

Getting Plowed

In the end, I found it the old fashioned way: randomly clicking around until I found something that looked dodgy.  It turns out, the behavior is called "plowing," and as usual, Microsoft is trying to help you.  With plowing enabled, objects behave much like the girls did towards me in junior high school: they jump way out of the way as soon as you get anywhere near them.

What's happening above is something I'd dubbed a "cascading plow" (mmm, cascading plow...).  The entity I moved got close to another entity, which jumped ten feet in some random direction, where it in turn ended up perilously close to another entity, which jumped out of the way, and so on, and so on...  

From what I can tell, there's two ways to turn this behavior off:

Per Object

Right-click any entity and choose Format, Behavior, and go to the Placement tab.  Here you can set one of two properties: 

• "Move other shapes way on drop", which you want to set to "Plow no shapes"
• "Do not allow other shapes to move this shape away on drop.

Which one you set is kind of a world-view thing:

Do you stop Moe from poking everyone else in the eye, or do you teach everyone else to do the Nose Salute every time Moe comes at them?  I suppose you could do both, but really I don't think Larry should have to always be on the lookout, so I set the first option to "Plow no shapes."  (Nyuk nyuk nyuk)

With this enabled, you can now move your entity anywhere you like, and it won't push other entities around anymore.  Of course, you'll run the "risk" of being able to have entities touch or even --gasp!-- overlap, but you're in control of that.  Connectors (i.e. relationships) will continue to route themselves automatically, but I find Visio does this pretty well.

Of course, you'll have to set this property on each and every entity you add to your diagram.

Forever and Ever, Amen

I don't really want to have to set the behavior on every entity from now until forever.  Having fixed one of my existing ER diagrams, the Plow No Shapes behavior works perfectly, and I don't want to ever go back to bumper car mode.

You can't officially modify the default stencils that ship with Visio (a stencil is the official name for a category of like controls-- when you select File --> Shapes, the little green window-pane items are stencils).  So if you like, you can right-click Entity, and choose Add to My Shapes, and add it to your Favorites stencil or a new stencil.  

Me, I'm fine with all the other controls in the Entity Relationship stencil, which opens by default with any new "Database Model Diagram".  I just want to change the behavior of the standard Entity, forever.  If you want to do that, you'll want to open up the standard Entity Relationship stencil, which on my system is located in c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Visio11\1033\ENTITY_U.VSS.  

With the stencil opened for editing (either your own or the standard ENTITY_U one), you can now right-click the Entity object, and choose Edit Master --> Edit Master Shape.  Right-click the shape, Format, Behavior, Placement, Plow No Shapes, and save.

Now when you create new ER diagrams, the Entity object won't act like an ass anymore.  You can move your entities around any way you like, and nothing with jump (or be plowed) out of the way.  

It's made my modelling life a whole lot easier, although I still have trouble with the four-inch heels.