DASE - Design-Aided Software Engineering

A visual design environment for modeling and generating multi-tier, multi-platform, multi-database, and multi-paradigm web applications — right inside VS Code.

Overview

DASE turns VS Code into a visual software-modeling workbench. The current phase ships the ORM Designer: an interactive canvas for building Entity-Relationship models stored as .dsorm files. Design your schema visually, validate it in real time, exchange it with DBML, and drive the whole thing with AI — through GitHub Copilot and any external Model Context Protocol (MCP) client.

Features

🎨 Visual ORM Designer

• Drag-and-drop tables, fields, and foreign-key references on an infinite SVG canvas
• Automatic FK routing with clean orthogonal, rounded connectors
• Color-coded tables and functional grouping for large schemas
• Marquee multi-select, group drag, and one-click Align Lines
• Zoom, pan, search, and a detachable designer window

🧩 Properties & Issues panels

• Live Properties editor (identity, data type, PK type, appearance, control) that reacts to selection
• Issues panel with real-time validation — duplicate names, missing primary keys, dangling FKs, empty tables

🔁 DBML interoperability

• Export any model to DBML
• Import existing DBML into a fully laid-out .dsorm

💾 Transparent persistence

• Models are plain XML (.dsorm) — diff-friendly and version-control-ready

AI Integration

DASE has AI woven into the modeling loop at three levels:

1. @dase Chat Participant

Ask questions and run commands directly in Copilot Chat:

@dase /model              Overview of the current ORM model
@dase /table Customer     Details of a specific table
@dase /validate           Run validation and list errors/warnings
@dase /export             Export the model to DBML
@dase /types              List available data types
@dase /help               Usage help

Plain-language questions work too — "How should I model a many-to-many between Product and Category?"

2. Copilot Agent Mode Tools

When Copilot is in Agent Mode, it can invoke DASE tools to read and modify the model directly: dase_add_table, dase_add_field, dase_add_reference, dase_move_table, dase_set_color, dase_update_property, dase_organize_layout, and more. Just describe what you want:

"Create a Customer table with Name, Email and BirthDate, then add an FK from Order to Customer."

3. AI Table Organization

DASE: Organize Tables using AI analyzes table names, fields, and FK relationships to infer functional domain clusters, repositions everything into readable groups, and color-codes each group. Pick your model, tune the layout, preview the prompt — and Revert in one click if you don't like the result.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) — standard, client-agnostic AI

Beyond Copilot, any MCP-speaking client (Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Claude Desktop, custom agents) can drive the live designer over the open Model Context Protocol — 42 tools covering the full DASE surface (read, write, and command triggers), thin wrappers over the same engine the built-in AI uses.

The MCP integration is a separate product: DASE-MCP (@tootega/dase-mcp). This extension contains no MCP code at all — it only exposes a loopback agent bridge (plain JSON over HTTP) that the standalone DASE-MCP server connects to. DASE never loads, installs, or configures an MCP server.

Claude Code (recommended): install the plugin — it finds the right VS Code window automatically (multi-window safe) and reconnects after restarts:

/plugin marketplace add HermesSilva/DASE-MCP
/plugin install dase-mcp

Other MCP clients: run the same standalone server over stdio (npx @tootega/dase-mcp / the bundled dase-mcp.cjs); it discovers the bridge endpoint written to bridge-endpoint.json in the extension's global storage.

The bridge: enabled by default (dase.agentBridge.enabled), loopback only, on an OS-assigned free port (dase.agentBridge.port = 0), with an Origin allowlist (anti DNS-rebind). Turn the setting off to close the entry point entirely.

A sample of the exposed tools: dase_get_model, dase_list_tables, dase_get_table, dase_validate, dase_export_dbml, dase_add_table, dase_add_field, dase_add_reference, dase_move_table, dase_set_color, dase_update_property, dase_apply_organization, and more. Full API reference: DASE-MCP/docs.

Quick Start

1. Create a new file with the .dsorm extension (or open an existing one)
2. The ORM Designer opens automatically
3. Right-click the canvas to add tables, fields, and references
4. Watch the Issues panel for validation, tweak in Properties
5. Save to persist — or ask @dase / your MCP client to build it for you

Requirements

• VS Code 1.99.0 or newer
• (optional) GitHub Copilot for the @dase chat participant and Agent Mode tools
• (optional) Any MCP client for the standard-protocol integration

Documentation

For full documentation, development guides, and contribution instructions, see the main repository README.

License

MIT License — see LICENSE for details.

Built entirely through AI-driven development.