The great CA Plex ‘Entity Creator’ – Update 2.0

Things have been a little quite on the ‘Entity Creator’ front for a while, this is mainly due to other projects and priorities, like leaning .NET C# to assist me more when Plex 7.0 comes to GA which is soon, which is great J

I had a few items outstanding from my last update

http://leedare-plex2e.blogspot.co.nz/2011/11/great-ca-plex-entity-creator-update.html

I have made some progress with these in recent weeks.  Mainly around the entry of non key attributes for the new entity.  This was quite a challenge as I wanted to cater for field replacement overrides, for text and field naming clashes.  I have also managed to improve the workflow, error messaging and validations to ensure the new entity and all its related objects and triples are added correctly.

I am pleased to say that the next part of the puzzle is complete.

Assuming that you have read the previous postings here is a sneak preview with the latest editions to the tool.

So! What’s new on the eye candy and functionality part then Lee?

This is the Entity Attributes entry screen.  You can select a field from a user defined pick list, give it a name (which is validated) and override the field and decimals place lengths as appropriate.

You can also select other entities in the model to create a ‘Refers To’ foreign key relationship.

‘For Text’ if supported if you wish and just like CA Plex itself, if referring to any file more than once then a ‘For Text’ qualifier is required for second and subsequent relationship declarations.

Upon clicking next and assuming you have passed the relevant validations then the following screen shows a summary of the entity to be created and a easy to view tree control.  (In the future I will allow you to expand the ‘Owned By’ or ‘Refers To’ relations and select virtual fields.

That’s about it for now apart from the fact that you can also decide if ‘Sharing’ is used when you confirm the entity creation on the confirmation screen.

Another little note is that internally the system handles replacement field (automatic override) name clashes in a similar way to Plex and 2E by using a surrogate suffix.  As you would expect the tool advises you if this happens.

Hope you like what you have seen.

Thanks for reading.

Lee.