Web Application: Visual Designer

Creating Decision Making Architecture Products

The Visual Designer is a modeling, presentation, and diagramming application to support you as an architect in your core activities, such as creating and generating the draft and final version of architecture products. Using this web application, you will create architecture designs and architecture visualizations based on models and metamodels.

The Visual Designer is a vector-based modeling application. This means that every shape you use in a visualization can be sized indefinitely, large and small, and all other attributes of the shape can be manipulated by you (shadow, border width, fill color, etc..). There is no loss of graphical quality.

Playground

To learn Dragon1 quickly, we have created a playground: a cabinet in the Visual Designer filled with partial models, views, and visualizations. You can click on anything and alter some things, but not at all, to see what happens.

You can access the Playground cabinet by going to www.dragon1.com/visualdesigner and choose File --> Open From --> Cabinet

Access To Your Repositories

The Visual Designer provides limited features to access via the Explorer TreeView your repositories (called Cabinets). So, all the data you may have stored via the Architecture Repository in your repositories can be accessed and used again here in the Visual Designer.

Creating Static, Dynamic and Interactive Visualizations

What is so special about the Visual Designer is that you can create dynamic and interactive visualizations. These are graphical schemas of views of models or the models themselves. This allows you to create a diagram with formal shapes or sketch with informal cartoonish shapes of the same model or view. If the data changes in the model, the diagram or sketch will be updated automatically (if you want).

Not only static visualizations but also dynamic visualizations can be created by you. This means you can add popups, click response, click through to other visualizations, add sounds and videos, frames and layers, and everything else you expect in interactive visualizations.

Creating Atlases

You can create Dragon1 atlases in the Visual Designer. A Dragon1 atlas is a bundle of Dragon1 visualization.

You define a tree view type of structure with an atlas item and page item. Per page item, you refer to a visualization, view, model, roadmap, dashboard, or any other data entity you created or available in your account.

Creating Playable Scenario Animations

Dragon1 supports creating playable and animated scenarios. Suppose you want to show how time processes are supported differently with new applications or visualize how applications are migrated to the cloud. This you can do with scenario animation.

In the visual designer, you model and visualize strings or chains of steps and changes. For instance, define three migration scenarios starting with the same process landscape, data landscape, application landscape, or IT landscape.

Working with Views and Viewpoints

Dragon1 is a perfect BPM and EA tool. It enables you to create as many views per model as you like. A view is, in fact, a data filter on a model. Suppose you have an enterprise model with 20 types of entity classes in it, like processes, services, applications, and servers. With a view, you can filter out, for instance, all processes or everything but the processes. You can filter everything unrelated to a certain process or application with a certain attribute value.

Every view you define or create is a dynamic view generated on top of a model. In our opinion, it would be even strange not to generate but to draw a view.

Views are created for groups of stakeholders. For instance, for the CFO, accountant, and financial auditor, you create enterprise views and financial views from a financial viewpoint. This requires the ability to create viewpoints that are also present in the Visual Designer. You can define viewpoints consisting of the entity classes, types, and attribute values that make up a point of view for a certain type of stakeholder.

Make Presentations

In the Visual Designer, you create models, views, and visualizations. These visualizations often are diagrams (formal schematics). But you can also make presentations like you are used to using PowerPoint. So, there is no longer a need to cut and paste diagrams from a tool in PowerPoint, creating all kinds of inconsistent and outdated versions.

Publish Visualizations

Keeping the diagrams and presentations to yourself or having a manager log in to the Visual Designer application to take a look is an unwanted situation. You don't want anyone to see or access every piece you create.

On Dragon1, we have created a separate secure publishing environment where you can publish your content. This is called the Viewer. Now, your stakeholders only have to log into the Viewer, and they can only see the visualizations or do the things with the visualizations you want them to do.

In architecture, it is common for you to create various detailed versions of your architecture design in collaboration and have these versions approved. The working process is fully supported.

You can publish your content also publicly in channels on watch pages.

And of course, you can export or print your visualizations in pdf.

Tasks

Here we mention the most important tasks you will perform in the Visual Designer:

0. Enter and Update Data

The Architecture Repository is the primary application to enter data. However, you can also enter data or change/update it via the Visual Designer.

Enter Data - To enter data, drag a shape from the left bottom shape collections onto a canvas. Depending on your auto-inset checkbox checked, the Visual Designer will ask or not to insert this shape as a certain Entityclass and with a certain name.

Reuse Data - To reuse data from the repository, click on the icon in front of an item (a leaf of a folder). Automatically, the icon will be inserted onto the canvas. Also, the id, name, type, and class will be copied as attributes into the icon. Also, you can't update the icon's name by clicking, but through the following procedure.

Update Data - To update the name of a selected item in the tree view, click on the name in the toolbar (right after the thumbnail logo of Dragon1).

If you are privileged to change the item's name, a dialog will appear in which you can enter a new name. If you click OK, the name will be updated in the repository, and all modes, views, and visualization will use a new name for that item at once.

1. Draw Models

Create you models.

2. Setup Views

Set up your views.

3. Create Visualizations

Use the Visual Designer to design enterprise architecture and solution architectures to bridge your enterprise strategy and enterprise transformation.

Create a static visualization here.

Create decision-supporting visualizations.

4. Build Landscapes and Blueprints

Use the Visual Designer to create overviews and insights (detailed views) of your processes and applications.

Build your blueprint or landscape.

5. Create a Click-through set of Views and Visualizations

Use the Visual Designer to create modern generated report views and visualizations of your architecture models.

Create a click-through set.

6. Create Composed Architecture Layouts

Integrate your visualizations on a single canvas.

7. Create Playable Scenarios

Only available with Dragon1 BUSINESS and ENTERPRISE edition, you can build scenarios and play and even alter its course during the playing.

Build your scenario.

8. Concept Design and Modeling

Innovate. Explore. Invent. Use the Visual Designer as your Innovation Lab to create different versions or alternatives in collaboration and try out what is the best one.

Design your concept.

9. Make a Presentation

Create your presentation.

10. Publish a Visualization

Publish your visualization in the Viewer.

Publish your Visualization in a Channel.

Print or Export your Visualization as a PDF.