Chapter 4 Managing Profiles

Defining Extended Attributes in a Profile

Extended attributes are defined for a metaclass, a stereotype or a criterion. They are used to complement the definition of the metaclass or its instances in order to:

Control generation for a given generation target. In this case, extended attributes are defined in the target language or DBMS of the model. For example, in the Java object language, several metaclasses have extended attributes used for generating Javadoc comments.
Further define model objects in extended model definitions. For example, in the extended model definition for Sybase ASA Proxy tables, the extended attribute called GenerateAsProxyServer in the DataSource metaclass is used to define the data source as a proxy server.

Some extended attributes are defined by default in the resource files that ship with PowerDesigner. But you can also create additional extended attributes in a profile.

Extended attributes have a type used to define their data type and authorized values.