1. Overview

Having an individual MDG is a must for large projects. Most domains have a specific language that needs to be reflected as good as possible via UML. Whenever you start setting up a MDG you should at least have your domain analysis in a final state. This domain analysis needs to tell you which domain objects exist and which of them are important (need a special optical representation) what diagrams need to be created and in what context they are used.

The following chapters will tell you how to create the domain model and how to derive the MDG from that. Be prepared that those steps need a couple of iterations. That means you will introduce a MDG once you have a scaffold and then need to improve this to make it even more useful. Since changes to a MDG can be crucial I will explain how you can navigate around some of the worst pitfalls.

To avoid a pure hypothetical discussion I will stick to some artificial domain which hopefully can be understood by all readers. It shall be a custom bicycle manufacturer similar to what the guys at Orange County Choppers are doing.

I will describe the single steps one by one so you can create your own MDG at once. It is also possible to open the example model for reference in parallel. Just run a second instance of EA. However, you are encouraged to follow the steps in the next chapter directly. This will give you a quick run through all of the MDG creation process steps. Once you have that skill you can go ahead and learn about more advanced features in the following chapters.

While the first chapters just deal with the MDG surface I try to bring a bit light into what happens behind the scenes. It’s nothing you need to know for basic working with MDGs but it often helps understanding why certain things happen the way they do. If you need to know more about that you should have a look into my book Inside EA.

The example model which has been used to create this book can be dowloaded from here. This zip also contains resources which are used to create the samples used in this book. EA 12.0 (the most current build at time of creation) has been used when building the demos. However, it should work with most pre 12.0 builds as it does not contain too awkward constructs.