A legend is a colored, named box you place on the canvas to group or annotate a region of your ERD. Legends are how you add meaning that is not part of the database structure itself - labels like “Auth”, “Billing”, or “Owned by the payments team”.
What a legend is for
The schema says what the tables are; a legend says how to read them. Drop a legend behind a cluster of related entities and give it a name and color, and a reviewer instantly sees the grouping without you changing a single column.
Working with legends
- Create a legend from the control bar, then set its Name and Color.
- Move and resize it to frame the entities it describes.
- Delete it when it is no longer needed.
Legends live per context view
Like layout and waypoints, legends are part of a view’s presentation, not the shared schema. A legend you add on the main diagram is independent of your context views, and each context view keeps its own legends. This lets you annotate every view for its own audience without cluttering the others.
One schema, many annotated views
Because legends, positions, and routing are all per-view, you can present the same entities very differently in different places - a high-level “Auth” grouping in one view, a detailed checkout walkthrough in another - while the underlying entities stay a single source of truth.
Next
Tie it together with the Single source of truth workflow.