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 OpenEdge® 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.