erds

As a college student doing ERDs and DFDs, would like to know the answer to this as well.

Sure, but what you're talking about is widespread conspiracy to allow ERDs to be 'triggered' manually.

We use lucidchart and balsamiq at times to model ERDs using the crow's foot style.

There are certain gems for Ruby on Rails dev that generate ERDs from the schema,.

Love and have embraced Mermaid but dang some limits around ERDs is a bummer.

For creating ERDs as code, tools like dbdiagram.io and eraser.io are popular options.

I have found that diagrams tend not to be worth their effort for data models and ERDs.

I used to be bullish on creating ERDs, often using them as an onboarding exercise, even for databases with 100+ tables.

While polished ERDs can be nice to have, they aren't essential.

Sequence diagrams are great for API documentation, ERDs are great for database schemas, flow charts are great for user flows, data flows and logical flows.

A subset of UML's static object modeling diagram notation (which they adapted from OMT) can be used like ERDs, for a relational database without an ORM.

However, comprehensive ERDs are becoming rare, and that's okay.

They would talk to their customers to ask things like "What would you like to see feature X do?", write up ERDs and DFDs, flowcharts and such, and then come up with a huge document listing all of the requirements of the software.