Personas

groups A data solution lives at several levels at once. A business stakeholder cares about the conceptual model and how it ties to business capabilities. A modeller cares about logical structure and relationships. An engineer cares about the physical tables that get deployed. Personas let you serve all of those audiences from a single project — the metadata is the same, but each persona shows the slice that matters to them.

What is a persona?

A persona is a named viewing context that controls what you see in ADL. Choosing a different persona doesn’t change your metadata — it changes which objects, classifications, and relationships are visible, and how they’re presented on screen.

A few personas you might define:

• Business Stakeholder — Conceptual model and capability map only; physical tables hidden.
• Data Modeller — Logical objects, business keys, relationships; staging detail collapsed.
• Data Engineer — All layers visible, including staging tables and integration mappings.

Personas are defined per-project (in personas.json) and the active persona is stored per-user in browser local storage. Two people opening the same project can be looking at completely different views.

What a persona controls

Depending on the persona, you can filter or restyle:

• Which classifications are visible (and therefore which Data Objects show up).
• Which screens and panes are surfaced in the navigation.
• How relationships are drawn on the Graph — though the underlying rules are shared (see below).

Personas are about visibility and emphasis, not about gating capabilities behind permissions. There’s no security boundary — anyone who can open the project can switch personas.

Personas and relationship rules

A common point of confusion: relationship rules are project-wide, not per-persona. The styling that decides how a Foreign Key looks versus a “realizes” relationship is shared across every persona in the project. This is intentional — a relationship between two classifications means the same thing regardless of who’s looking. See Configuration → Relationship rules for the rule set.

Working with personas in ADL

You manage personas from the persona selector in the top header bar (and from the persona management dialog launched from there). From the selector you can:

• Switch between personas defined for the project.
• Create, edit, and delete custom personas.
• Mark a persona as the default for new visitors to the project.

The active selection persists per-user in browser local storage, so reopening the project picks up where you left off.

What’s next?

• Configuration — Where project-wide rules (including relationship rules) live.
• Graph — Where the active persona has the most visible effect.
• Classifications — Personas filter on classifications; classifications are the underlying tag system.