Creating table catalogs

You create a table catalog by saving the user tables that are in the current flowchart's internal table catalog. Saving table catalogs with commonly defined table mappings makes it easy to share or restore table mappings.

You can also access table catalogs from the Options menu while editing a flowchart.

Follow the steps below to create a table catalog.

Select Settings > Campaign Settings.

Click Manage Table Mappings.

In the Table Mappings dialog, select Show User Tables. The user tables that you want to save as a table catalog must be mapped in Campaign.

Select the user tables that you want to save as a catalog, and click Save.

In the Save Tables dialog, specify whether to save all table mappings to the table catalog or save only the selected table mappings to the table catalog, then click OK.

The Save Table Mappings to Catalog File dialog opens.

Enter a name for the table catalog. If you use .XML as the extension, the table catalog will be stored in XML format rather than as a binary .cat file.

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.

The name must be unique within the folder; otherwise you will be prompted to overwrite the existing table catalog with the same name. The name cannot contain any periods, apostrophes, or single quotation marks, must begin with a letter and can only contain the letters A-Z, the numbers 0-9, and the underscore character (_).

(Optional) Describe the table catalog in the Note field.

Decide whether to store authentication information with the catalog:

If you leave Save with Database Authentication Information unchecked, users of the table catalog will need to provide a database login and password for any data sources referenced in the table catalog. These passwords may be already stored in their ASM user profile. If a user does not already have a stored valid login and password, the user is prompted to provide them. This setting is the best practice for security purposes.

If you check Save with Database Authentication Information, the authentication information that you are currently using to access the data sources is saved with the table catalog. Anyone with access permissions to this table catalog will automatically be connected to the data sources using the authentication stored in the table catalog. Therefore, users of this catalog will not need to provide a login or password to access the data sources and will have all of the privileges of the stored login for reading and writing to the data source. You may want to avoid this setting for security reasons.

Use the Save Under option to specify where to save the catalog.

If you do not select a specific folder, or choose None, the catalog is saved at the top level. If you prefer to organize table catalogs in folders, select a folder from the Items List, or create a folder using the New Folder button.

10.

Click Save.

The table catalog is saved as a binary .cat file if no extension was provided, or as an XML file if you included .xml in the file name.