What are the correct stencils for object relational diagramming in visio?

Question

All of my Visio experience is with LAN/WAN documentation. I recently had a desire to visualize the relationship between objects in the Nagios configuration and I realized I didn't know how to do it properly and moved on to something more important. I was reading the responses to this thread and realized this is something software developers must do a lot.

So this is probably a soft-pitch question, but what is the proper method for documenting object relationships in Visio? Is there a better template to use? What stencil collection is the proper stencil in?

In my probably naive view I imagine an object being a large box with a single "reception" connector and containing multiple smaller boxes, each of which represents an object member and having its own connector. So, each object member field would connect out to the "reception" connector on the object of the member's type. In and of itself those objects are fairly easy to build. The problem I ran into is that the connector lines didn't respect the objects and ran over the top of them, making an awful, unusable mess.

Thanks for any pointers.

Answer 1

You can use a UML static class diagram with << stereotype >> annotations, which is the kind of thing you would do in Rational Rose for using UML for things that aren't necessarily classes and methods, such as databases.

Answer 2

I've been using these UML stencils for diagramming object models and entity relationship diagrams. It is fairly comprehensive. Be sure to take a look at the "tips" document... very important.