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3.3 Bindings Tool

The Bindings Tool is used to define the bindings of the Object, Relationship and Role types of the method within a Graph Tool. The Binding Tool has Relationship, Role and Object lists, each showing the items of that type in a given binding. Each entry in the Relationships list represents a binding; each entry in the Roles list represents a role occurrence for the selected binding; each entry in the Objects list represents a possible object type that can be in the selected role occurrence in the selected binding.

The Object and Relationship lists have a menu with Add..., Delete, and Edit Type; the Roles list also has Move... and Cardinality....

Add... adds a new relationship, role or object type to the binding under development. The type can be selected from a list of all relationship, role or object types in this graph type.

Move... allows you to give a new position to the selected role type in the list. Unlike the other lists, order is important in the Roles list: when a user creates an instance based on this binding, depending on user options, the order of selection of objects may be expected to match the order of roles here.

Delete removes the selected relationship, role or object type from this place in the binding, along with all dependent parts of the binding, e.g. removing a relationship type removes the whole binding.

Edit Type opens the appropriate type Definition Tool for the selected type (i.e. Relationship, Role or Object Tool).

Cardinality... sets the cardinality for the selected role occurrence. The cardinality is a range with maximum and minimum values and defines how many times this role occurrence with its object types can appear in the binding. The values can be from 0 to infinite, which is denoted by N.

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