Chapter 5 Objects

Attaching notes to an object

• The Notes tab in an object property sheet contains two sub-tabs:
  
  
  • Descriptions - in general, includes important information that does not fit into the General tab. For example, a description of the Employee entity might read: This entity has one occurrence for each employee in our worldwide operations. This base should grow by 20 percent in 2002.
  • Annotations - contains notes regarding the implementation of a model or the objects it contains. For example, an annotation of the Employee entity might read: Verify list of attributes with Director of Human Resources.

Both are editable directly in the tab with the internal PowerDesigner RTF editor, which includes the following tools:

Tool	Description
	[shift + F11] Open Editor Menu. For more information, see "Working with textual symbols" in the Diagrams and Symbols chapter.
	[Ctrl + E] Edit With. Opens your default RTF editor you previously defined or allows you to select another editor if you click the down arrow beside this tool. For information about defining a default editor, see section "Specifying text editors" in the Models chapter.

You can insert the content of an existing text or RTF file in the RTF editor to use it as a standard for your descriptions or annotations. This can be very helpful to standardize objects notes as you can have a description or annotation RTF file for each object type, and open it when needed.

To insert a .txt or .rtf file in the RTF editor:

1. Double-click an object in the diagram to display the object property sheet.
2. Click the Notes tab.
3. Click the tab (Description or Annotation) that contains the text you want to edit.
   
   The corresponding tab is displayed.
4. Click the Open Menu tool and select Insert from the dropdown menu.
   
   A standard Open dialog box is displayed.
5. Browse to the directory that contains the file to open.
6. Click OK.
   
   The content of the file is displayed in the RTF editor.

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