Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress Dynamics Basic Development

Field naming conventions

Use the same name for fields in different tables if they can be used as join fields, such as Customer.CustNum and Order.CustNum. If the fields cannot legitimately be used as join fields between two tables, then make the field names different, even if the information is from the same domain of values (such as ShipToNumber and BillToNumber). This convention simplifies query syntax to take advantage of the Progress <table> OF <table> construct. It also enables modeling tools such as ERwin, and other tools that must make associations between tables, to make the correct determinations on how tables can be related.

Progress Dynamics can take advantage of table and field names that are a meaningful string of words. The framework can replace the standard delimiter (whether underscore, capitalization, or something else) with a space to create a meaningful name for a message text or label. For example, if your naming convention uses underscores as delimiters between parts of a name, you can specify that delimiter in the entity import. Then, ERwin’s macros converts the field name “customer_name” to “customer name” for use in messages and labels. Entity import needs it to determine other things like table codes, descriptions, fields, and so on.

If you use the ERwin modeling tool to define the database and generate the OpenEdge® schema, there is a macrocode supplied with Progress Dynamics that defines an initial label for every field. The label is the field name with the delimiters replaced by spaces. Observing the naming convention can save a lot of time completing the definition of all the entities and fields of a new database schema.