When you create and develop the initial structure of a STEM model, it is usually easy to maintain a mental picture of how the elements interact, and also convenient to work within a single view, where a little scrolling is all that is required to refresh your memory of how the model fits together. As the model develops in complexity, it may become helpful to show different perspectives in a number of separate views, each focussing on one particular aspect of the model design; or it may be that the model is simply more manageable in smaller chunks – see 4.19 Working with multiple views.
Unfortunately, as soon as you start working with multiple views, a certain discipline is required to ensure that a given element has an iconic representation in all the relevant views. For example, you might use one view to present a hierarchy of Collections of Services, whilst showing mappings between Services and Resources in another. If you then create a new Service in the first view, it won’t automatically appear as an icon in the other view. However, it may well inherit links to Resources if you copy its
data from another Service, and this relationship will not be readily apparent if the Service and Resource icons are in separate views.
Whilst this sort of issue is little more than an irritation if you are working on your own, it can be a real barrier to understanding the design and structure of a model developed by a colleague or business partner. Two new auditing features have been added with this problem in mind. The first helps you find all elements which are related, either directly or indirectly, to a selected element, whilst the second arranges the elements in a view according to the various links which exist between them. In conjunction, these two features provide a clear path to establishing and understanding the relationships between elements in an unfamiliar model.