What is a table catalog?
A table catalog is a collection of mapped user tables.
Table catalogs store all the user table mapping meta data information for re-use across flowcharts. Table catalogs are stored by default in a proprietary binary format using a .cat extension. For more details, see “Stored table catalogs overview” in the Campaign User’s Guide.
You can also store (and subsequently load) a table catalog in XML format by providing a table catalog name ending with a .XML extension. Saving a table catalog as XML makes it possible to view and interpret the values. XML format is especially useful for editing purposes. A common use of the XML format is to globally search and replace all references to a production data source name with a test data source name. This makes it easy to make table catalogs portable between data sources.
You use table catalogs to:
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Easily save, load, and update your commonly used user tables.
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Create alternative data mappings (for example, to switch between running against a sample database and the production database).
You can save mapped user tables to a table catalog, then use the same table catalog in other flowcharts. This means you can:
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Make changes to the table catalog in one flowchart, then propagate these changes to other flowcharts by importing the updated table catalog into each flowchart.
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Retain the internal catalog you first loaded for that flowchart, although you copy it to other flowcharts and make changes there.
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Make different changes to the internal catalogs of a number of different flowcharts, starting from one “template” table catalog.
You should delete table catalogs only using the Campaign interface. If you remove tables or otherwise change table catalogs directly in the file system, Campaign cannot guarantee data integrity in your system.
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