The ORM Foundation

Hi development team
3 questions, please
- what does mean IsPersonal property for an entity?
- why tinyint type is absent in data type set?
- is there any way to tell Norma to separate a table that has 1:1 relatioship with another table or is a subtype of another table?

1) IsPersonal will eventually change some of the verbalization patterns to use 'who' instead of 'that'. For example, a Person EntityType might be marked with 'IsPersonal=true'. This will come into play more with advanced verbalizations that Terry promises to write specs for after his book is done. You should see new verbalizations coming on line very quickly at that point.

2) It needs to be added. We've added some other ones, no reason to not do this one. It is commonly used. I'll look at getting it in for the next setup drop.

3) Yes. With the (relatively new) 'Map to Relational Model' extension, you get a new extension property on the Subtype relationship. You can choose to absorb (the default), separate (create a separate table), or partition (if the identifying type has a disjunctive mandatory across all subtypes) to create one table per subtype. Note that the triggers needed in lieu of the foreign keys lost when partitioning is implemented (identifiers are now spread across tables) have not been implemented.

-Matt

Where is the 'Map to Relational Model' extension? Is it a separate download? Where can I find it?

Thank you!

 Hi Eric

  Thanks for your query. Just right-click anywhere on the document window, and choose Extension Manager. In the Extension Manager dialog, select  the "Map to Abstraction Model" check box (this will automatically turn on the "Map to Relatonal View" option). If you want to see the relational schema diagram rathe thand just access the schema from the Obeject browser, also check the Relationaql View option.

 For more details, please see the NORMA labs posted in the Library -- we should be updating most of these soon.