Making Shared Resources Available in the New Model Dialog

Once you have set your named paths, grouped your resources to share into the external folders, and pointed your resource lists to them, you can create model creation categories and model templates to enforce the use of these shared resources for model creation.

Model category sets contain categories which in turn contain templates for creating models and which point to predefined target resources. Once you have created a category set, you can make it appear in the New Model dialog by selecting it in the General Options dialog.

Since model category sets are themselves PowerDesigner resource files, and you will need to deploy the category set to your users, you will need to store them with your other resources to share and specify a named path to point to them.

  1. If you have not already done so, create a named path to point to the folder where you will store your model category sets, ready to upload them to the repository.
  2. Select Tools > Resources > Model Category Sets to open the List of Model Category Sets, click the Path tool and browse to and select this path.
  3. Click the New tool to create a new category set, give it a name, and click OK. Create the categories that you need, and as many diagram templates as you need to point to each of your shared resources.
    Note: For detailed information about creating model category sets, see Customizing the New Model Dialog.
  4. Once you have created your category set, select Tools > General Options, and click the Model Creation category in the left pane.
  5. Make sure that the Enable categories checkbox is selected, and then select your category set as the default.
    Note: Your category set will only appear in this list if it is correctly defined and the list path is set to point to your shared resources directory.
  6. [optional] Deselect the Enable model types and Enable model template files checkboxes to hide these options in the New Model dialog.
  7. Click OK to save your changes, and then select File > New Model to open the New Model dialog and review your category set.
  8. Once you are happy with your category set, check it in to the shared resources folder in your repository (see Checking Resources to Share into the Repository).