Entity Relationship Diagram

An entity–relationship model (or ER model) describes interrelated things of interest in a specific domain of knowledge. A basic ER model is composed of entity types (which classify the things of interest) and specifies relationships that can exist between entities (instances of those entity types). Wikipedia.

Note that practitioners of ER modelling almost always refer to entity types simply as entities. For example the CUSTOMER entity type would be referred to simply as the CUSTOMER entity. This is so common it would be inadvisable to do anything else, but technically an entity is an abstract instance of an entity type, and this is what an ER diagram shows - abstract instances, and the relationships between them. This is why entities are always named using singular nouns.

erDiagram CUSTOMER ||--o{ ORDER : places ORDER ||--|{ LINE-ITEM : contains CUSTOMER }|..|{ DELIVERY-ADDRESS : uses 
erDiagram
    CUSTOMER ||--o{ ORDER : places
    ORDER ||--|{ LINE-ITEM : contains
    CUSTOMER }|..|{ DELIVERY-ADDRESS : uses

Entity names are often capitalised, although there is no accepted standard on this, and it is not required in Quick Diagram.

Relationships between entities are represented by lines with end markers representing cardinality. Quick Diagram uses the most popular crow's foot notation. The crow's foot intuitively conveys the possibility of many instances of the entity that it connects to.

Entities and Relationships

Quick Diagram syntax for ER diagrams is compatible with PlantUML, with an extension to label the relationship. Each statement consists of the following parts, all of which are mandatory:

    <first-entity> <relationship> <second-entity> : <relationship-label>

Where:

  • first-entity is the name of an entity. Names must begin with an alphabetic character and may also contain digits and hyphens
  • relationship describes the way that both entities inter-relate. See below.
  • second-entity is the name of the other entity
  • relationship-label describes the relationship from the perspective of the first entity.

For example:

erDiagram PROPERTY ||--|{ ROOM : contains 
erDiagram
    PROPERTY ||--|{ ROOM : contains

This statement can be read as a property contains one or more rooms, and a room is part of one and only one property. You can see that the label here is from the first entity's perspective: a property contains a room, but a room does not contain a property. When considered from the perspective of the second entity, the equivalent label is usually very easy to infer. (Some ER diagrams label relationships from both perspectives, but this is not supported here, and is usually superfluous).

Relationship Syntax

The relationship part of each statement can be broken down into three sub-components:

  • the cardinality of the first entity with respect to the second,
  • whether the relationship confers identity on a 'child' entity
  • the cardinality of the second entity with respect to the first

Cardinality is a property that describes how many elements of another entity can be related to the entity in question. In the above example a PROPERTY can have one or more ROOM instances associated to it, whereas a ROOM can only be associated with one PROPERTY. In each cardinality marker there are two characters. The outermost character represents a maximum value, and the innermost character represents a minimum value. The table below summarises possible cardinalities.

Value (left)Value (right)Meaning
`\o``o\`Zero or one
`\\``\\`Exactly one
}oo{Zero or more (no upper limit)
`}\``\{`One or more (no upper limit)

Identification

Relationships may be classified as either identifying or non-identifying and these are rendered with either solid or dashed lines respectively. This is relevant when one of the entities in question can not have independent existence without the other. For example a firm that insures people to drive cars might need to store data on NAMED-DRIVERs. In modelling this we might start out by observing that a CAR can be driven by many PERSON instances, and a PERSON can drive many CARs - both entities can exist without the other, so this is a non-identifying relationship that we might specify in Quick Diagram as: PERSON }|..|{ CAR : "driver". Note the two dots in the middle of the relationship that will result in a dashed line being drawn between the two entities. But when this many-to-many relationship is resolved into two one-to-many relationships, we observe that a NAMED-DRIVER cannot exist without both a PERSON and a CAR - the relationships become identifying and would be specified using hyphens, which translate to a solid line:

erDiagram CAR ||--o{ NAMED-DRIVER : allows PERSON ||--o{ NAMED-DRIVER : is 
erDiagram
    CAR ||--o{ NAMED-DRIVER : allows
    PERSON ||--o{ NAMED-DRIVER : is

Other Things

  • If you want the relationship label to be more than one word, you must use double quotes around the phrase
  • If you don't want a label at all on a relationship, you must use an empty double-quoted string
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