Model Once, Apply Everywhere

One of Ellie’s core principles has always been reusability: define an asset once, and apply it everywhere. It’s about building models that stay consistent as they grow, while reducing duplication and keeping teams aligned.

So far, this principle has shaped how entities move across models. Now we’re extending the same superpower to relationships — the critical links that tie your entities together.

With reusable relationships, consistency isn’t just about the boxes on your canvas. It’s about the relationships too.

Glossary Relationships Arrive

With this release, relationships are no longer tied to a single model. You can promote a local relationship into a glossary relationship and apply it consistently across every model.

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Once a glossary relationship is reused in multiple models, any change you make — from renaming to adjusting ends — propagates automatically everywhere it’s used. Edit once, and your entire modeling landscape stays aligned. 

On the physical level, relationships also include attributes, making it easier to capture technical details right where they belong — inside the relationship itself.

Switch on suggestion mode, and modeling gets faster. Ellie shows relevant glossary relationships for the entity you’re working on — just pick the right one and add it with a click.

And because glossary relationships integrate with the features you already rely on — copy, versioning, conversions, and undo/redo — you can model without worry, knowing everything stays consistent and predictable.

Consistency Without the Effort

With glossary relationships, you no longer need to recreate the same connection in multiple models. Define it once, reuse it where needed, and any updates propagate automatically.

Suggestions help you find and add the right relationship faster, and attributes on physical relationships keep technical details close to the logic they belong to.

This makes modeling more organized, reduces duplication, and ensures consistency to keep your models clean.

The Reusability Journey Continues

This release marks the beginning of reusable relationships. You can already start taking advantage of them today — and we’re just getting started.

In upcoming iterations, reusable relationships will become even more powerful, with better management and organization to help you govern them at scale. That means they will be part of glossary pages and search, making them easier to find and work with. And beyond that, more improvements are on the way to make modeling faster, more reliable, and easier to manage across your entire environment.

More in This Release

Alongside reusable relationships, this release also introduces the Conversational Data Navigator — combining an AI chat experience with smarter source exploration. It makes navigating your data faster and more intuitive than ever.

Read more in our dedicated post: Introducing the Next-Gen Conversational Source Navigator

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Try Glossary Relationships today

1. Open or create a model.
2. Add a local relationship between two entities.
3. Right-click and choose “Add to Glossary” to promote it.
4. Switch to suggestion mode to quickly discover and add existing glossary relationships to another model.

📘 For more details, check out our user guide or reach out to support@ellie.ai.