As I have been working with the modeller I have thought of a few things that
would easy my task of creating a model for an existing DB. Before creating
JIRA issues on these, I thought it might be a good idea to see what others
have to say (and to make sure I have not missed some existing feature that
allows me to achieve what I want :-).
(1) Ability (as a preference, particularly when reverse engineering?) to
treat string ids as meaningful attributes. I know from my EOF days that
meaningful ids are to be avoided, but sometimes they just make life easier
(or you have no choice :-). All the numeric ids I deal with are meaningless,
but the string ids are meaningful. For example, our database has a number of
key "type" lookup tables - having a string as the PK saves lots of lookups
on the DB for reports, summary list displays etc. The type table in turn can
contain data that aids certain business processing logic based around the
type (at which point the lookup is not a big hit in the scheme of things).
It also enforces simple referential integrity.
A possible extention would be to have a button that makes an object's
primary key "visible"/"invisible", with the option to ask that the
attributes in other objects that are fk links to this object become
"visible"/"invisible" as well.
(2) The ability to push an attribute or relationship down to a (specific)
subclass or up to the superclass
(3) The ability to go back to the previous entity that you were editing.
Ideally some sort of drop down with the latest 10 (number configurable in
preferences?) entities (object or database) where a selection jumps
automatically.
Any comments? Shall I create JIRA entries for each of the above?
Thanks
Derek
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