Adding Metadata for Reporting

Metadata and Modeling. These seem to be two topics that are intertwined today. Modeling used to be just about a pretty picture that i could talk the business people into authorizing a project plan. Today, most architects are trying to impact how developers are creating applications while verifying the inputs from the business are correct.



In that vein, there are also some additional needs for the architect and IT in general, so let me cover a simple extension/collection metadata example.



The information architecture that I was working with in PowerDesigner was very complete, and we used PD to update our scripts and generate new database objects, like tables, procs and indices. The customer i was helping in this area had a new requirement to track some compliance information on what data they are storing. For an architect with 3000 entities and over 400 tables, this was a daunting request.



So, with PowerDesigner, we can extend the meta model of the Table object to collect additional information. Here is a pic showing the extended model definition and the addition of some compliance attributes.



This picture also shows the creation of a new Tab in the Table properties sheet in PowerDesigner. Now this is the cool part. I can change the user interface in PowerDesigner to allow for this collection directly in the tool.



anyhow, will come back to this, running out of time today.