Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress Dynamics Basic Development

> ## Using ERwin with Progress Dynamics

> ERwin is an entity-relationship modeling tool. You can use it to design a new database and then generate the OpenEdgeŽ schema for the database. Several important capabilities of Progress Dynamics take advantage of features in ERwin. Progress Dynamics provides a customized ERwin template to act as the foundation for using these features.

> This section is an overview of using ERwin together with Progress Dynamics to design a database. Note that ERwin is an entirely independent product and is not sold or supported by Progress Software Corporation, although Progress does provide templates and macrocode.

> The customized template includes custom data types and formats for Progress Dynamics. You can use them to generate Progress field definitions with a particular format and a standard data type. Using the many data domains in the template, you can set a field’s format, default value, or other characteristics simply by picking a domain.

> For example, Figure 2–1 shows that object ID fields are defined as type `o_obj`. This convention provides a decimal data type definition of the right kind, and also associates a database trigger with the field to assign the object ID field.

> Figure 2–1: ERwin Attribute Editor showing object ID definitions

> Progress Dynamics also takes advantage of ERwin macrocode to generate 4GL database trigger procedures for your OpenEdge database, as illustrated in Figure 2–2.

> Figure 2–2: ERwin Table Trigger Editor

> Figure 2–3 shows the expanded Template Code editor for the `Create` trigger example. Note the references to macros that expand into Progress 4GL code to enforce referential integrity checks and other standard operations.

> Figure 2–3: Expanded Template Code editor

> Figure 2–4 shows the 4GL code generated by these macros. The ease of generating this code is a tremendous benefit in creating your application database and its supporting triggers.

> Figure 2–4: 4GL code generated by ERwin macros

> The ERwin customizations in Progress Dynamics also generate default field labels automatically. If you construct field names to be a meaningful sequence of words, delimited by underscores or another delimiter you can specify, then a default label is generated with the delimiters replaced by spaces.

> These benefits save time when generating a new database schema using ERwin for a Progress Dynamics application.

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