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Log in with your Ellie account: you can have an Ellie account created based on your email address. Enter your email address as your username, your Ellie password, and click Login. If you don’t know your password or have forgotten it, you can also reset your Ellie account’s password from the login page by clicking on the Reset password button.
Log in with your Microsoft account: if your organization has enabled Azure Active Directory user management in Ellie, you can use the Login using Microsoft button to log in with your Microsoft credentials. Note that usually your Microsoft account is entirely managed by your own IT department; if this login option is used in your organization, you cannot change your account details or reset your password from Ellie. If you’re unsure whether or not the Microsoft account login has been enabled in your organization, please check with your own Ellie admins.
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Editing a Conceptual Model
When you wish to start editing a Model, an Entity or a Metadata, click on the ‘Edit’ button in the upper right corner of the screen.
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Picture 2. You can switch between the Edit and View modes in Ellie, depending on the situation.2. When you are editing a large Model, you can free up visual space by showing and hiding the sidebar on the right.
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Picture 3. Use the arrows to show and hide the sidebar from the right.3. In order to add an Entity, use the drag’n’drop feature by selecting an entity from the sidebar and dragging it onto the place you wish it to reside in.
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Picture 4. Do a drag’n’drop swipe in order to add an Entity4. Double-click on an Entity in the canvas to access the Entity’s Glossary view, where you can edit its metadata. There is also an Edit button in the Glossary view, for editing.
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To browse content in Ellie, there is a view mode (unless the user has Admin or Write privileges, they are automatically in the view mode).
Click on View
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Picture 5. You can switch between Editing and Viewing the content in Ellie, depending on the situation.(You can use the button in this area of the screen to switch from the Edit to the View mode)
2. Right-click on an entity to open a context menu. This allows you to, for example, view the Metadata of the Entity - such as seeing if there is a Description set for this specific Entity. You can also set the Entity type or Font size here. Or replace the Entity with another one, or delete it from the canvas.
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Drawing Relations
When you are done placing Entities into your model by using drag’n’drop, you can start drawing lines that will indicate a Relationship between the Entities. Just click on the border of a source Entity, and, while holding the left mouse button down, drag your cursor until you reach the border of another Entity. The Relationship type will be drawn with the default selected type (Draw as on the toolbar). You can also change the default Relationship type.
When you right-click on the pale grey circle at the border of an Entity, you will get to change the Relationship type
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Picture 7. Select the preferred Relationship type2. Click on the T in the top bar to add a free-format text box, excellent for further explaining the Relationship between these two Entities, or for adding to-do notes or other additional text on the model canvas.
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Picture 8. Add additional free-text information by drag’n’dropping the T iconYou can also attach Relationship labels to Relationship lines: Click on a Relationship line, in the exact place you want to have a Relationship label. This creates an elbow. Now, Right-click on the newly created elbow, and select Edit from the context menu.
You can add a description to this elbow and choose the position it will be displayed in. The options are: above, below, left of and right of the elbow. In the example below, a Relationship label “Relationship description” will be attached to the Relationship between the Company and the Invoice Entities. The orange circle denotes a node in the Relationship, also referred to as an elbow.
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Changing Entity Size
When you move your mouse cursor on top of an Entity, corners appear. Click and drag on the corners in order to resize the Entity.
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Relationship Types and Cardinalities
In the first phase you can just start by drawing a Relationship, without defining cardinalities:
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Picture 11. Defining a Relationship typeThis specific three-pronged cardinal means that only a general “one-to-many” is specified, with no optional-mandatory things configured, as of yet. Often in the early phases of modeling, this is enough (saving time, as you don’t have to dig too deep at the beginning of modeling), and you can add defining details later on.
We might want to specify that each Invoice has to have an Organization attached to it. This Relationship is “one and only one” (a mandatory Organization for Invoice). This sort of Relationship will look like this:
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Picture 12. Setting Cardinals works for both of the directionsFirst, there are no crows feet in the Relationship from Invoice to Organization, we know that this is “one-to-one”. After that, we have defined that there has to be exactly one Organization for each Invoice (minimum 1, maximum 1) - by adding a little cross-line (read it as “number one”).
If we want to specify that an Invoice does not have to have an Organization attached to it, we can use the following Cardinal. This one means “zero or one” (Organization is optional for an Invoice):
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Picture 13. There are many cardinalities to choose fromBy having no crow's feet in the Relationship between the Invoice and the Organization, we now know that this is a “one-to-one” (max is 1). Then we can define that an Invoice does not have to have an Organization related to it, by adding a circle (you can read this as a “zero”).
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In our experience, business people understand this quite intuitively. You can find more detailed explanation of subtypes in Ellie from our Modeler’s Corner blog post 4 subtypes in data modeling.
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Entity Types
In Ellie, the idea is to make models more readable, faster to build, and easier to add information about the nature of the data you are seeing. This is based on the notion that there are certain similarities between models, even across different industries. We have seen that a simple categorization of entities helps here. This should be considered a “best practice style” that can be used on top of a normal conceptual model.
The entities are divided into six classes: Master data, Contract, Transaction, Reference, Transaction header, and Transaction detail. In Ellie, these are color-coded in the following way:
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Picture 15. You can browse Entity types, when in the View mode, by clicking on the Explanation box on the bottom left corner.You can find more information on Ellie’s Entity types from our Modeler’s Corner blog post 2 entity types.
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Click on the wheel icon on the Dashboard (frontpage)
Then click on Users
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Picture 17. Adding new users is a snap!3. Click on the + Create users button
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We have a separate page documenting how to import entities and attributes into Ellie - please follow this link: How to import attributes to Ellie from Excel
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In case you have more questions, we’d be happy to help you!
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