Chapter 7 Linking and Synchronizing Models in PowerDesigner

Linking Models Using Shortcuts

PowerDesigner lets you reference objects among different models with shortcuts. You create a shortcut between models of the same type when you need to reuse an object into another model.

Shortcuts allow you to address the following needs:

Update : When you need to share an object between several models, you can duplicate it in the different models where it has to be used. However, when the definition of this shared object changes, it often raises update problems because it is not possible to guarantee that all copies of the duplicated object are synchronized. Most of the time you end up with shared objects with different definitions
Reusability : When you need to reuse the properties of some objects and make other objects inherit these properties. For example, let's consider entity Person has four attributes: Name, Age, Nationality and Address. When you create an inheritance link between Person and Customer and Employee, both entities inherit the attributes of Person. Since you are likely to reuse Person in several other models, you can create libraries of reusable objects which properties are inherited by new objects in different models. However, it is impossible to guarantee that when you modify the definition of a reusable object, this change will also affect the children in all the different models

PowerDesigner addresses both needs with the shortcut feature.

For a complete description of shortcut properties and behavior, see the "Managing Shortcuts" chapter.