Customizing Your Modeling Environment

PowerDesigner is highly customizable. You can modify its interface to suit your work habits, , set default naming conventions, change the appearance of object symbols, add new properties to objects, and even create your own types of objects.

• User Profiles
  User profiles help you to standardize the look and feel of your models and to support standards. Profiles allow you to group options and preferences together for sharing and reuse across your organization. Various profiles are provided with PowerDesigner, and you can create your own.
• Guiding Model Creation through Categories and Templates
  You can create model templates with predefined targets, extensions, and first diagrams to help guide users through model creation. You can organize these templates in categories and share them with your team, supplementing or even replacing the default New Model dialog with these categories.
• Display Preferences
  You can set default display preferences for the symbols in your model. Using the Display Preferences dialog box you can:
• General Options
  You can control the look and behavior of the PowerDesigner interface through the general options, the values for which are saved in the registry of your local machine.
• Naming Conventions
  You can use naming conventions to specify a case, maximum length, and valid characters for object names and codes, and to invoke conversion scripts and conversion lists to generate appropriate object codes from names (or names from codes).
• Windows
  The PowerDesigner main window is divided into different windows with independent behavior.
• Toolbars
  Toolbars are designed to provide quick access to specific menu commands and to ease creation of objects related to a target language.
• Resource Files and Extended Model Definitions
  The PowerDesigner modeling environment is powered by resource files, which define the objects available in each model along with the methods for generating and reverse-engineering them. You can view, copy, and edit these XML-format resource files in order to customize and extend the behavior of the environment.