Top tips for using Ellie

Getting Started

Ellie runs in the cloud; no installation is required. Just open your favorite web browser and navigate to your organization’s Ellie instance. Usually, the URL is in the form of https://yourorganization.ellie.ai .

There are two options for logging in:

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.

Picture 1. Ellie login screen.

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.

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.

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.

Picture 4. Do a drag’n’drop swipe in order to add an Entity

4. 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.

5. Right-click on an Entity to change its Entity type (there are multiple types, all signified by colors, such as Master, Contract, Transaction, etc. (See the section on Entity types for more information on the category types)).

Viewing Content

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

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.

Picture 6. Right-clicking will preview the Metadata of the selected Entity

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

Picture 7. Select the preferred Relationship type

2. 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.

Picture 8. Add additional free-text information by drag’n’dropping the T icon

You 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.

Picture 9. Editing relationships

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.

Picture 10. Changing Entity sizes

Relationship Types and Cardinalities

In the first phase you can just start by drawing a Relationship, without defining cardinalities:

Picture 11. Defining a Relationship type

This 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:

Picture 12. Setting Cardinals works for both of the directions

First, 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):

Picture 13. There are many cardinalities to choose from

By 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”).

Entity Subtypes

Entities can have subtypes. Let’s look at an example of a travel agency industry to illustrate subtyping in Ellie.

Hotel Booking and Flight Booking are subtypes of Booking. Customer and Booking Confirmation are related to the main entity Booking, and Flight Booking and Hotel Booking have their own relationships.

This kind of notation is used by e.g. Len Silverston in his Universal Data Models books, and by Graeme Simsion in his book Data Modeling Essentials.

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.

Picture 14. Subtypes in Ellie

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:

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.

Setting an Entity Type

Right-click on an Entity. Choose the Entity type from the context menu. In this example, the Entity “Customer-account role” is assigned to be a Contract.

Picture 16. Selecting Entity types

In the picture above you can see that a Bank transaction (Type: Transaction) has to be related to one specific Account (Type: Contract). An Account might belong to only one branch (these are traditional branches, but in the internet banking world, there are no branches).

The Customer-account role resolves the many-to-many relationship between the Account and Customer. The Roles are typically Contracts. The Branch and Customer are typical Master data Entities, and the text box gives some examples of the Customer-account role, in order to make this model more understandable.

Adding New Users

In Ellie, adding new users has been made incredibly easy and frictionless.

Click on the wheel icon on the Dashboard (frontpage)
Then click on Users

Picture 17. Adding new users is a snap!

3. Click on the + Create users button

4. Create as many users as you like - all you need to do is have their name and valid e-mail address.

5. Define the role of each user, a role can be either Admin, Write or Read. Admins can create new content (Models, Business Glossary, Collections, Reports) and add more users - they can also add users as editors to restricted Collections. Write users can also create new Models, Collections, Reports and Business Glossary items, but cannot add more users. Readers are only allowed to view the Models, Glossary Items, and Reports.

Logical Models

Logical Modeling introduction

When Ellie launched originally, you had a place to "Create a Model". This Model was actually called a Conceptual Model. We renamed the segment to Conceptual Model when Logical Modelling was introduced, as it then became possible to create either a Conceptual or a Logical Model.

The positions for creating a Logical Model (or LM for short) or a Conceptual Model (or CM for short) are the same as they always have been.

You can create a CM or a LM from the Dashboard by clicking on the + sign right next to Models on the left.

Or you can navigate to the Model List View, where on the sidebar, you have three buttons,

New Collection, New Logical Model, New Conceptual Model.

After clicking on the New Logical Model button, you will be navigated to a form where you can set the name and the description of the LM.

After typing in a valid name for the New Logical Model, the Create Logical Model button will be enabled. After that, you are transported onto the LM Canvas where the editing of the LM will now commence.

As you can see, a LM does not currently include Textboxes (these will be added in a future update), and the Export is directly available from within the Logical Model. You can also Edit the model info. If there is a need to communicate with Ellie support, you can tell them the ID number of the Model (Shown in the somewhat darker grey area, sometimes referred to as the title bar)

As per the canvas, you are presented with an empty Canvas, so click on the Add Entity button to start adding Entities specific to your Logical Model. These entities will not become visible in the Glossary Index List, or from the Search bar from the top right corner.

Editing Model Info

This is a simplistic dialog where you can chane the Name and the Description of the Logical Model. You will immediately see the changes when you press Save.

Adding an LM Entity

After clicking on the Add Entity button, you are presented with the Create Entity dialog. When creating Entities in a LM, the process is somewhat different simply because of the hierarchy and content of a LM.

An Entity can have a name, and can have multiple Attributes. Each Attribute can be designated as a PK (Primary Key) or a FK (Foreign Key). If you so choose, you can even designate an Entity as both a PK and a FK. You can also select and delete Attributes.

Here is a tiny example allowing me to click on Delete Selected Attributes to delete the lowest Attribute.

After clicking on Delete Selected Attributes, I will click on Create Entity to finish the creation of the Entity.

Here is what the newly created LM Entity will look like on the LM Canvas. It will be placed in the center of the Canvas, so if you create multiple Entities, they will appear on top of eachother - move their location so that you can start creating hierarchies.

As you can see, each specific row will also show whether the Attribute is a Primary Key or a Foreign Key, or a Non-key Attribute.

You can continue Editing an Entity by clicking on the Edit button, or you can click on the trashcan icon to delete the Entity.

As per CM, you can also create relationships between Entities in LM.
Let's show that by creating a secondary Entity and connecting the two.

By hovering your mouse over the Bolded Corner of an Entity, it will change into a crosshair, and you can press your left mouse button down and start dragging towards the bolded corner of another Entity in order to create a Relationship.

A dashed line will appear between the two Entities, and after you release the left mouse button, a One to Many Relationship will be formed.

If you right-click on the Relationship symbol, you will be able to change the Relationship Type or Delete the Relation. If you click on Relationship Type, you will see a sub-context menu with the usual Relationship arrows.

When your LM has at least one Entity or more, you will see that the Export button is enabled.

You can use it to

Export Entities
Export Attributes
Export Relations

These will come out in the .CSV format

The format of the filename will be

{OrganizationName}-model-{ModelName}-{TypeOfExport}-{DateInYYYYMMDDFormat}.csv

Such as

exampleOrganization-model-New Logical Model Created For Tutorial 2-entities-2022-01-31.csv
exampleOrganization-model-New Logical Model Created For Tutorial 2-relationships-2022-01-31.csv
exampleOrganization-model-New Logical Model Created For Tutorial 2-attributes-2022-01-31.csv

Use these in the application of your choice.

You can also use the Model Export API to export LM data, same as you already do with the CM data.

Modeler’s Corner Blog posts

Importing content to Ellie

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

In case you have more questions, we’d be happy to help you!

You can contact us by e-mailing support@ellie.ai.