Engineering Wizard - Review and Customize

DirectionDB DesignPhysical DBFormattingCustomizeScript

An important step of the engineering wizard allows you to review the differences between the source and destination databases.  You get to see exactly what needs to be changed in order to bring the two into synch and you can do as many (or as few) of these changes as you want.

This screen gives you an expandable, hierarchical view of all of the database objects.  All objects that are different between the source and destination databases will be selected for engineering by default.

Remember that the source and destination databases are different depending on whether you are forward or reverse-engineering:

Engineering Action:

Objects that are different between the destination and source databases have a toggle box to the left specifying whether they will be added/altered, removed or ignored by the engineer.

Other Icons:

Icons to the left of each entity name let you know whether the entity exists in the physical database and the database design.

Show/Hide Details:

The Show Details/Hide Details toggle button opens up a comparison of the selected entity between the database design and the physical database.  You'll be able to see exactly what the engineer is planning to change.

Example:

In the example below, some changes to a Visual Case design are being forward-engineered to the physical database.  Both the Visual Case design and the physical database consist of a single table: CD.  The screen shows that the engineer intends to:

• alter the CD_Name column to increase the length to 100,

• add a new column called CD_Category, and

• drop the Release_Date column.

Related Topics:

• Engineering Access Databases

• Setting up an ODBC Data Source

• Engineering Wizard

• Forward-Engineering
• Reverse-Engineering
• Introduction to the Database Engineering Tool