The Workspace

A 5-minute tour of the four panels you'll spend all your time in.

The ERWIN interface is dense — especially the first time. But once you understand the four main panels, everything else makes sense.

The four panels

1. Model Explorer (left panel)

A hierarchical tree of every object in your model — entities, relationships, domains, key groups, indexes, views. Think of it as a file browser for your model.

To find an entity by name, just expand the Entities folder. Double-click any item to open its property editor.

If you've accidentally closed it, this is how to bring it back.

2. Diagram canvas (center, the largest area)

This is where you visually lay out entities and relationships. It's a scrollable, zoomable canvas. You can have multiple subject area diagrams in one model — for example, a "Customer-facing" diagram showing customer + order entities, and a "Internal" diagram showing employee + payroll entities.

The zoom controls are in the bottom-right corner. Use Ctrl + scroll for quick zoom, Ctrl + 0 to fit-to-window.

3. Toolbox (right panel or floating)

Buttons for everything you can add to the diagram:

• Entity — the rounded-rectangle table icon. Click then click on the canvas to place.
• Identifying relationship — solid line (child's PK includes parent's PK)
• Non-identifying relationship — dashed line (FK in child, but not part of child's PK)
• Many-to-many relationship — gets replaced with a bridge table when you switch to logical/physical
• View — represent a database view
• Subtype — for inheritance / generalization patterns

4. Property Editor (bottom or pops up on double-click)

When you double-click an entity or relationship, the property editor opens. This is where you do 90% of your real work — adding attributes, setting data types, defining constraints, writing definitions for documentation.

Switching between Logical and Physical views

ERWIN's trick: you maintain one model that contains both the Logical and Physical layers. You switch views to see and edit each separately.

The model-type dropdown is in the top-right corner of the workspace — usually shows "Logical" by default for new models. Switching changes:

• Entity names — Logical shows business names ("Customer"), Physical shows table names ("CUSTOMER" or "tbl_customer")
• Attribute names — Logical shows "Customer Name", Physical shows "CUST_NAME"
• Data types — Logical shows abstract domains ("Text", "Currency"), Physical shows DB-specific types ("VARCHAR(50)", "DECIMAL(10,2)")
• Indexes & tablespaces — only visible in Physical

Useful keyboard shortcuts

Save your work format

ERWIN's native format is .erwin (in versions r9+). Older versions used .er1 — ERWIN can still open these but saves new files as .erwin.

For backups, export the model as XML:

The XML format is plain-text and version-control friendly. Recommended if you keep models in Git.