Summary

Dictionary Assistant provides the tools you need to standardize meta data contained in your Clarion dictionary with your Clarion application. 

Meta data contained in your dictionary can be queried, reported, exported and analyzed with sophisticated ease courtesy of our own powerful Wizard tools.  Dictionary Assistant provides bulk updates of the major column attributes to finally ease the tedious manual process of dictionary standardization.   Available elements include Tables, Columns, Indexes, Controls, and Relationship attributes.

Run queries to satisfy quality control questions like: “Are all of my fields named DESC the same size?” or “Do all ID columns have the Do Not Populate attribute set?”.  Query Wizard provides the tools to create and endless number of conditional queries that are important to you and your dictionary standardization and quality control review.

Clarion Support

All versions of Clarion are supported from C55 through the latest C11 releases.  Please note that the Column Update feature depends on the exported .dctx file that is only exported from recent versions of the Clarion IDE.  You can still use the dictionary column update capability with older versions (C6x and prior) of a Clarion dictionary, provided you mange it with the new Clarion IDE.

Column Update

You can now update the major attributes of your Clarion Dictionary columns with the bulk and edit in place editing capability in Dictionary Assistant.  Your edits are all highlighted in an accessible browse for review before processing the commit process.  The entire commit process is automated with a single step that will result in an updated Clarion dictionary file.  Extensive error reporting and backup will give you an audit trail of your changes and an easy path back to the original if needed.

Editing is simple with edit in place or tagging with Query Wizard and/or manual tagging that can then be used for bulk edits on the major attributes supported.  Using Query Wizard will allow you to drill down on the problem columns and it is a simple process from there to automatically apply your corrections.

The column update feature will save you countless hours of otherwise mind numbing updates via the Clarion Dictionary.  If you are serious about standardizing your dictionary, then you need the column update capability in your arsenal.

Schema Export

Included is an export facility that allows you to save your dictionary to the standard Schema Definition Language (XSD) format for interoperability with other environments. The XSD format is used by Visual Studio and other environments as a pseudo data dictionary and is now available to you with a click of a button.

Integration with Application Assistant

When Dictionary Assistant is used together with Application Assistant, you have access to a powerful Exception Reporting system that will compare settings from dictionary fields with those same fields where they are used in the application to produce a very sophisticated exception report. This allows developers to quickly see and fix problems where the application meta data differs from the dictionary settings.

The integration with Dictionary Assistant goes further with the Column Utilization report which provides a cross-reference between the Dictionary Columns and Application Control Usage.

Reporting

The custom reports combined with Report Wizard, allows you to further your analysis and can be beneficial when communicating with clients or internal project stake holders.

Create deliverable Dictionary Documentation using the Dictionary Print Assistant. The Dictionary Print Assistant is a very concise semi-customizable report that produces a standard dictionary report suitable for project documentation. This report has been designed to fit the entire table (and respective subordinate information) on a single page.

Save custom reports or built-in reports to a variety of formats including: PDF, XML, HTML and Text. Creating custom exports directly to Microsoft Excel using Spreadsheet Wizard opens everything up to custom formatting and analysis when you need it.

Dashboard

Provides a quick overview with graphs that give a high level overview of your dictionary structure and composition.  This is a great place to start and creates another level of understanding of your dictionary providing insight into areas where standardization and organization efforts can be focused.