Project

About this chapter

This chapter describes and explains the Project.

What Is It

The Project is a container which allows your documents to be categorized beyond the ability of the Workspace. The Project also contains the ability to connect to a data source using ODBC. A Workspace may have any number of Projects. The Project is saved in XML format and like the Workspace it does not store its child objects in its XML file - it simply stores file references to them. The file extension of a Project is ".DAProject".

Using The Project

The purpose of the Project is to group documents and, optionally, provide a connection to a data source. The main menu does not have any options which act directly on a Project so it is important to understand how to invoke the Projects popup menu.

Menu Options

The Project has its own popup menu which can be accessed by <right-clicking> on it in the browser. The following shows a Projects popup menu;

Of particular note is the Connect/Disconnect menu option. This option is used to connect/disconnect to the data source. Any Physical Models and SQL Files within this Project will share this connection.

Editing Properties

The Project property dialog is invoked by selecting the Properties menu option ( prop

) from the Project popup menu. The Project has the General and Login properties. The following shows the Login property tab;

The Data Source Names provided are queried from the ODBC sub-system. Use your systems ODBC Administration tool to manage Data Source Names. The Data Architect main window tool-bar has a button ( ODBC

) which, when clicked, will attempt to invoke this utility.

Adding Child Objects

Child objects can be added to the Project by using the Project popup menu in the browser. The Project popup menu has the following relevant options; New, Open and Add. In all cases a reference is added to the Project. The Add option differs from the Open in that it allows multiple files to be selected and does not try to load any of them.

The following table shows the object types which can be added as a child of a Project;

Icon	Name
	Diagram (free-form)
	Logical Model
	Physical Model
	SQL File

The Workspace references are relative file names. The fact that the reference uses relative, instead of absolute file names allows the Workspace file to be used on another machine. However; moving the Workspace files or any of the files it references may result in the reference becoming invalid.

Removing Child Objects

Objects which are immediate children of the Project can be removed by invoking the popup menu of the object to be removed and selecting the Remove ( del

) option. This does not delete any files on the disk - it simply removes the reference from the Project.