Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Filtering Your DB Objects in the Application Navigator

I'm working with a customer who is using JDeveloper to manage his database object defintions. He has created an offline database by reverse engineering his very large database and uses our built-in integration with SCM systems (Perforce in this case) to version those objects and manage them at the object level.

Because he has such a large number of objects I've been thinking of ways for him to view the objects he wants to see and work with more quickly.

To illustrate this post I'm using an offline database I'm working on at the moment. And as you know me (read the post - 8 Things You Didn't Know About Me) you wont be surprised to see that Blues features strongly!

So, how can I view my offline database objects? First, utilising the Navigator Display Options. I can quickly go from an alpha- listing of my objects to listing them by object type by simply deselecting the Sort by Type option.















Alternatively I can use Working Sets to filter out object types. In this example I'm hiding sequences and triggers by adding a File Filter to hide the other database object types (in my example I only have tables, sequences and triggers currently). With this in place I can see that the files to be displayed are as I want them.




Finally, I've saved this working set as 'Tables Only'. I can now go on and develop my Working Sets to cover other listing that are appropriate to my model. This could mean filtering files by name, folder or by type.

Working sets were initially developed for filtering large Java EE applications, but work equally well in the database domain