Entity Relationship Diagrams

The yEd graph editor allows easy creation of Entity Relationship (ER) diagrams.
Edge representations with arrowheads and adornments according to Crow’s Foot notation
are supported.

Entity nodes, attribute nodes, or relationship nodes can be created by dragging
sample representations from the ‘Entity Relationship’ section in the Palette tool window
into the active editor window (using a mouse drag gesture).

This palette section also holds representations for edges that support Crow’s
Foot notation.
To create a corresponding edge:

  1. drag the representation for an edge type onto a node in the active editor,
  2. release the mouse, thus denoting the start node for the edge, then
  3. drag to another node (optionally creating bends in the edge by clicking on empty
    locations in the editor), and
  4. with a final mouse click denote the target node for the edge.

Entity Node with Attributes

This node representation uses two labels, one for the entity’s name, the other
for the attributes.
You can edit each label by double-clicking it.

To list attributes line by line in the second label, you can insert line breaks
between attributes.
This is done by using either ENTER or Shift-ENTER (according to the setting of
the ‘Label Editor’ option on the Editor tab of the Preferences… dialog).