Thursday, August 30, 2012

PowerDesigner:: How to reroute links

Have you tried to manually reroute a link in PowerDesigner (PD) and been frustrated that, no matter what you try, you can't get the link to go the route you want it to go?

After much irritation at not being able to find a way to do this in the help documents, I emailed pubs@sybase.com to see if they could tell me where to find help topics on this.  They responded by giving me not only the help pages to review, but giving me step-by-step instructions on how to do it.

My problem involved routing lines around other tables.  If the most direct route was through another table and I couldn't move any of the tables involved, I wanted to go from top-to-top, bottom-to-bottom, or side-to-side around the blocking table.

It turns out that I needed to add "elbow joints" to the line and then drag the line between the two new elbow joints.  How far to drag this section was not apparent, but it appears that one must drag the line far away from the actual route desired so PD will actually create the two new right angle turns in the line.  If you don't go far enough, PD will either return to where you started or create a new route not what you want.

Once you drag the line far enough away to actually get the route to do what you want, you can drag the center portion (between the two new elbows) to where you really want the line to go.

The help page to look at is:
Core Features Guide > Modeling with PowerDesigner > Diagrams, Matrices, and Symbols > Symbols > Manipulating Link Symbols

To add additional "elbow" points, ctrl-click on the link where you want to add the new elbows.  By the way, these are temporary elbows and if you don't get the results you wanted after dragging the link, you will have to recreate them.

Once you have added two new elbow points, left-click on the space between the two elbows and drag it to where you want the route to go (a little farther is better).  Once you get the link to have the route you want, you can move it desired position by dragging between the two new right angles.

PowerDesigner 16.1 Repair

After installing an EBF, do you quite often find PowerDesigner does not work properly?  A very common occurrence I have is the receipt of the following message (multiple times, I might add):

After Googling this error and trying some of the suggested fixes, I finally called PD support and this is what worked:

1. Close PD.
2. Start - Control Panel
3. Programs and Features
4. Right-click Sybase PowerDesigner ...
5. Click "Change"
6. Click "Repair"
7. Click "Next"
8. Click "Finish"
9. Open PD - hopefully it works.
10. If not fixed, uninstall PD, reinstall base PD and last EBF (they are cumulative.)