When your project is simple, you are able to express all of the design ideas with just a few diagrams. The diagrams are simple and self-explanatory. Each of them represents a distinct design idea and there is no overlapping between diagrams.
When you are dealing with a complex project, you may need to draw multiple diagrams to represent different contexts. You need to borrow shapes from a diagram to make them appear in other diagrams (i.e. contexts). In fact, this is extremely common when modeling with class diagram and business process diagram . Take UML class diagram as an example, there may be a domain diagram that presents all the entity classes and, another diagram that presents the associations and dependencies between a specific controller class and its related entity classes. So in this case, both diagrams contain the same set of entity classes.
Instead of re-creating those classes again and again in different diagrams, Visual Paradigm allows you to “re-use” them. Through simple copy and paste (Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V), you can easily copy a shape from one diagram to another. Each shape is formally known as a “view”. So with this, you can create multiple views for a model element in representing different contexts. Changes made on a shape are all synchronized to other instances that appear in other diagrams without extra effort. This is great, but there is a drawback though.
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