Engineering Wizard - Getting Started

Direction DB Design Physical DB Formatting Customize Script

Physical Database

You must have a physical database accessible from your computer (although it can be completely empty). Visual Case will not create the actual database. This enables us to allow you to engineer to an ODBC-compliant database that isn't explicitly supported by Visual Case.

ODBC Data Source

Set up an ODBC data source on your machine that points to the physical database.

How do I set up an ODBC data source?

If you are forward-engineering to Microsoft Access and you have Access installed on your machine, you don't have to engineer using ODBC. In fact, it's recommended that you specify the direct path to your data file in the engineering wizard since some of the ODBC scripting commands aren't recognized by Microsoft Access.

Tell me more about engineering Access databases.

Database Permissions

Make sure that you have adequate permissions to view and modify the physical database. The engineering tool will allow you to specify a username and password if necessary.

Backup your Data

Visual Case will always attempt to script the database changes so as to minimize the loss of data (by using ALTER commands instead of ADD and DROP). However, this is not always possible. It is your responsibility to ensure that you have adequate backups of your data.