The generation mode defines the physical implementation of an inheritance structure by specifying which entities in an inheritance structure should be generated as tables in the PDM.
Property |
Description |
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Generation Mode |
Specifies which parts of the inheritance will be generated. You can specify one or both of the following:
Note that, if you do not select Generate Children, you can control the generation of individual child tables using the option Generate in the property sheet of each child entity. |
Specifying attributes |
In the case of parent-only generation, you can choose to define a specifying attribute, an entity attribute that is defined for a parent entity which differentiates occurrences of each child. In the example below, the TITLE entity has two children, NONPERIODICAL and PERIODICAL. As only the parent table TITLE will be generated in a PDM, a specifying entity attribute PERIODICAL is defined for the inheritance link to differentiate between the two child entities. In the PDM, each of the child entity attributes will generate columns in the table TITLE, and the specifying entity attribute PERIODICAL will generate a corresponding column PERIODICAL. The values of this column indicate whether an instance of TITLE is a periodical or not. The tools available on this tab for creating specifying attributes are the same as those for creating entity attributes. For more information, see Creating an attribute. |