The ORM Foundation

 Hi there,

 Would it be possible to display the (syntactic) data type in the ORM verbalization browser? For example; I have a value type "Name" which has a data type "variable length" and may not be longer than 32 characters. The verbalization of that value type is as follows;

As far as I know, the only way to include the "weak" value constraint (as it is called in my favorite big brown book ) is to generate the relational view with the extension manager.If possible, I'd like to avoid this and only include ORM diagrams and their verbalisations in my design documents.

Hi Karl,

I'll just add it in, it shouldn't be hard.

If it is OK, I'll just show the numbers instead of text with them. There are currently two fields (length and scale) that are basically placeholders and appear with different names in the properties window (length becomes precision for Money and Decimal types). Translating those names into verbalization snippets (which pull strings from a totally different and much more configurable source than the resource files) is more involved than I have time to get right now, so you'll just see numbers like (10) or (13, 5) at the end of the text. A length of 0 translates to MAX in the relational mappings, but I'm not going to try any data transformation here. You'll just see (0).

'Portable data type' is not a name we display anywhere else, so I'm changing this to 'Data Type:' to match other verbalization strings (like 'Reference Mode:'). Also, if an entity type has a resolved reference mode then its identifier also resolves to a single data type, so I'll go ahead and show the data type as well. This will give you the information without expanding reference modes, which is a hassle.

Let me know if there are any objections and I'll put this in the next release on the NORMAPreview page.

Cheers, 

-Matt 

 Hi Matt,

 That sounds perfect. Can't wait!  

 Regards,

Karl 

 Hi,

 I don't want to sound impatient but I was wondering when the next update to NORMA will be available 

 Regards,

Karl

 Hi Karl,

Earlier this week when we met in Bolzano, Matt told me that there is not much work left to do on the next release so he would get it out "pretty soon".

However, he is working flat out on some urgent projects so "pretty soon" for him is probably "not soon enough" for the rest of us.

Ken 

Hi Karl,

I have some minor changes to make before changing the dll version and officially releasing. In the mean time, http://ormsolutions.com/NORMAPreview is kept up to date with builds from the latest sources and will be very close to the next official build.

-Matt