Chapter 9 Customizing your Modeling Environment

User Profiles

User profiles help you to standardize the look and feel of your models and to support standards across your organization. Various profiles are provided with PowerDesigner, and you can create your own to contain default values for:

Display Preferences – to control the color, shape, size, etc. of your diagram symbols and the information that is displayed upon them
Model Options – to control naming conventions, case sensitivity, notation, default values, etc.
General Options – to control dialog preferences, environment variables, fonts, etc.
Check Model options – to control which checks are applied, and which are errors, warnings, etc.
Other options – such as the layout of toolbars and windows, favorite pages, default columns for grids, etc.

User profiles can contain any number of default preferences and options, the application of which is cumulative. Thus, if you:

Apply a user profile that directs that table symbols in the physical data model are drawn by default in red, and that view symbols are drawn in blue (via display preferences)
Apply a second user profile that directs that table symbols are drawn in green.

The result will be that table symbols are drawn in green, and view symbols are drawn in blue. You can, of course, override these default preferences and options locally in the model.

User profiles are PowerDesigner resource files, and so can be opened and edited in the resource editor, but in general you will create and edit them by extracting preferences defined in a model, or from your registry.