Entity Relationship Diagram / Cardinality / Crow's Foot Notation


I’m interested in creating Entity Relationship Diagrams in Miro, and I’ve seen a template for them, but I think a major thing missing is crow’s foot notation which shows cardinality in the relationship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93relationship_model

 

I would love to see this kind of notation added to the list of arrows and other end-points that you can put on connector lines. 

 

 

I love Miro and would prefer to use it for any types of diagramming, but for people who need to use this kind of notation to make content and data models, Lucid Chart has the market. If Miro can get on board with the means to create more technical diagrams, even just beginning with these notations, I think they would be able to engage many more users.

If anyone has figured out a work-around for this, I would love to hear how. 

Here are a couple of articles worth reading for more understanding of how Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD) can be useful for designers.

https://uxpamagazine.org/designing-future-friendly-content/

https://uxdesign.cc/structured-content-design-workflow-a-case-study-fd74ec25f17d

Thank you for this thorough explanation and feedback, @andyfitts! I will pitch your idea to the Miro team.

For now, I will move the topic to a Wish List :wink:  Let’s see how many people also wish this functionality in Miro.


I’d like to see this as well. I’m working on a content model for a website and the current notation set is limited. We’ve been using LucidChart for this kind of thing, but would prefer to do it in Miro given our research is managed in Miro.


I would also Love to see this feature!

I used existing Line ends and created a “Key” chart above my diagram; but it doesn’t do it justice! But it got the job done! :) 



I Feel like basic support for these diagrams could be added simply with alternate Connecting Line Ends (Aside from Arrows and Dots) 


Please add me to the list of people who would find this really useful.  The ability to designate cardinality is one of the few things that pushes me back to Visio, which after using Miro is really painful


We need this, too. Without it, we’re likely to use other solutions.


Same here - ERDs are one of the few evergreens among technical drawing frameworks. Very useful to model data…


this is basically MUST for any technology data modelling, surprised it is not part of the product 


I completely agree this is a must to have feature. Due to this feature unavailability, I have to look outside tool to design Entity-Relationship diagrams.


There is few things that I would wish for in miro...but THIS is definitely it! I would fo one step further, I’d love to have full ERD functionality in miro, with custom entity shapes in which we can define name, attributes, Primary and Foreign Keys etc. This would enable me to bring our whole engineering team to miro and finally have engineering and product collaborate fully in one tool. 


+1 - at the moment I use draw.io for this, but the business uses Miro for lots of other things - it’d be great to have one tool. I agree with Knuth above that having even some very basic name/fields/keys functionality is really a must here too.


+1 - would love to see this in Miro. As mentioned above - we’re using Lucid card for ERD with crow’s foot for now, but would love all our diagramming tools to be in one place.


Count me in too!  Cardianlity and ordidinality - you just can’t do an ERD without them.


Please please add this in the next update. I really want to be able to create an ERD in Miro
So now I use Lucidchart for the ERD


+1 Must have! This kind of diagram was the main reason for me to look at a tool like Miro.


I would find this a valuable addition. 


I use this as a workaround (well actually I prefer it over crow’s foot notation, as it’s easier to read for people not used to ER diagrams):

So you have:
one: 1
many: n
zero or one: 0..1
zero or many: 0..n
one or many: 1..n

 

You can just do this by double clicking on the connector and entering the text there.


I would also love to see crow’s foot notation in Miro. Andy Fitts (no relation, though he is a colleague!) links to an article I wrote about creating domain models. For the diagrams I use there, I actually start the work in Miro, but end up moving it to Omnigraffle for the final diagram. Adding crow’s foot to line ends would allow one to stay in Miro (and stay collaborative!) for the whole thing. The text workaround Jens mentions above does also communicate cardinality, though when I’m labeling the lines (as in a domain model, or other representations of an acyclic graph), it’s nice to limit the amount of text on a single connection. 

So: please add one more vote to the pile! +1


I’d like to see this feature in Miro.

I think there are a few key elements that should exist:

  1. It should support all of the diagrammatic elements noted above
  2. It should provide a mechanism for formatting the diagram, and importantly this formatting should strive to preserve the notion of visual hierarchy (either a top-to-bottom or left-to-right).
  3. It should provide full support for the IDEF1x standard and the concepts it details, such as base-type-subtype relationship clusters.

No need for crow's foot notation. I also use chen notation, like Jens suggested, but I would also prefere to have the possibility to import parts of a db scheme from a sql-dump into the canvas; with or without Relationsgips.

That would help a lot when working with already existing complex db.

Thanks


Please add crows foot notation :laughing:


+10000


Please add crows foot notation


Please please please add crows foot notation


This is the feature I miss the most in Miro from less user-friendly tools. I tried creating a custom plugin to add line endings to no avail. This would make sketching out data models a lot easier!


I would also love to see crow’s foot notation in Miro