[ER Diagram] Allow omitting the type of an attribute

[michaelschufi]

Proposal

For prototyping, I would like to omit the attribute's type in my ER Diagrams. This can very well be an implementation detail and is often not important for the initial discussion of the entities and their relationships.

Example

Let users omit the type altogether.

erDiagram
    CUSTOMER ||--o{ ORDER : places
    CUSTOMER {
        name
        custNumber
        sector
    }
    ORDER ||--|{ LINE-ITEM : contains
    ORDER {
        orderNumber
        deliveryAddress
    }
    LINE-ITEM {
        productCode
        quantity
        pricePerUnit
    }

and/or allow an _ or similar to specify that the type should be omitted.

erDiagram
    CAR ||--o{ NAMED-DRIVER : allows
    CAR {
        _ registrationNumber PK
        _ make
        _ model
        _ parts
    }
    PERSON ||--o{ NAMED-DRIVER : is
    PERSON {
        _ driversLicense PK "The license #"
        _ firstName "Only 99 characters are allowed"
        _ lastName
        _ phone UK
        _ age
    }
    NAMED-DRIVER {
        _ carRegistrationNumber PK, FK
        _ driverLicence PK, FK
    }
    MANUFACTURER only one to zero or more CAR : makes

Screenshots

If no type is specified for every attribute of an entity, do not render the type table column.

[msugar]

This would also be useful for creating Logical models, which have entities with attributes but no key types or column data types.

Currently, we can create Conceptual models (entities and relationships, but no attributes) and Physical Models (entities, relationships, and attributes with key type and column data type). So having the ability to easily diagram Logical models would be a very welcome addition.

[jgreywolf]

We did something similar for class diagrams recently. Let me look into what it would take to port this to ER diagrams as well