Installing the free edition of Visual Paradigm
How to install Visual Paradigm community edition
While writing an article on implementing Many to Many Relationships in databases the need for a diagramming tool became clear. At work Visual Paradigm is the tool for all UML and data modelling requirements, so it was good to read there is a free community edition that can be downloaded for personal use. The Community Edition page has a link on the left hand-side to download Visual Paradigm.
Clicking on the round image highlighted in yellow will prompt for registration or a user name and password. Once you have registered the next page has two checkboxes, select the second check box to request a license key as an attachment, this will be sent as an email to the address provided during registration.
Then click on the Download button to start downloading the large (140 Mb) executable file. Once it has been downloaded running the executable will start the installation procedure, you will be prompted for location and so on. When the installation procedure prompts for the product to be installed, make sure you select Visual Paradigm for UML.
The next dialog to be displayed prompts for the edition to be used, select the Community Edition as that is free for personal use.
The final dialog prompts for the license to be used. Select the Single License Key option and in the file path box enter the path and the name of the license key file that was attached to the registration email.
That pretty much completes the installation. When you first run Visual Paradigm you will be prompted for a workspace which is where all of the diagrams you create will be stored. Make sure this is set to a path of a location that does get included in backups, particularly if you plan to create diagrams that would be difficult to recreate if they were lost due to a disk crash.
The next part of this article will describe how to get started with Visual Paradigm and how to create the first Entity Relationship diagram.