Methods and apparatus, including computer systems and program products, that implement a modeling editor associated with development objects. A computer program product includes instructions operable to receive user input including a user-defined graphical object, and a selection of a development object from a set of development objects in a development environment; generate an association between the selected development object and the user-defined graphical object; generate a graphical representation including the user-defined graphical object; and store the graphical representation and the association in a document. A graphical object need not be associated with any of the development objects. The user-defined graphical object can be presented to a user. Presenting the user-defined graphical object can include selectively presenting information associated with the user-defined graphical object based on user settings, such as abstraction information that can define an abstraction level for presenting the user-defined graphical object.