Inside Oracle Designer/2000

PREFACE: Preface

Inside Oracle Designer/2000 is a complete reference for Designer/2000, the Oracle Corporation's suite of business modeling, system design, and software development tools. The book offers extensive coverage of each tool and addresses all the important concepts that software engineers working with Designer/2000 must master.



What This Book Is About

The following is a list of the top ten things this book covers:

1. Methodology
2. Business process modeling
3. Business Process Reengineering (BPR)
4. Information Systems analysis
5. Data modeling
6. Application design
7. Business rule definition and implementation
8. Web-based (thin client) application development
9. Database design and implementation
10. Software modules design and generation

Through examples and software provided with it, the book will show you how to use Designer/2000 for each of the topics listed above. The section"Organization of the Book" further ahead provides additional information on these and other topics discussed in the book.



What Benefits the Book Provides

The following is a list of the top ten benefits you will get from reading Inside Oracle Designer/2000:

1. A complete reference for Designer/2000 version 2 tools.
2. A guide through the rapid design and development of an application within the first three chapters, to introduce Designer/2000 and highlight the principal activities you perform with it.
3. Presentation of concepts and activities in an iterative fashion to allow you to build graduallyyour knowledge, confidence, and comfort level with Designer/2000.
4. Concrete examples for each important concept encountered during design and development activities.
5. Step-by-step instructions on how to perform each activity in Designer/2000.
6. A guide through the process of designing and implementing an On-Line Transaction Processing system.
7. Information on how to use Designer/2000 to model and design a data warehouse.
8. A companion CD-ROM, which you can install and use in your environment and which contains all the application systems discussed and built in the book.
9. Over 170 Lotus ScreenCam¨ movies, which you can play
back to see how each important activity or task is performed.
10. A number of tips and techniques to organize and manage the Designer/ 2000 repository and tools.

Organization of the Book

Inside Oracle Designer/2000 is organized into five parts. The following paragraphs summarize the contents of these parts.

• Part One. This part introduces you to the tools, features and ways of working with Designer/2000. If you are new to Designer/2000, read carefully the first three chapters, which walk you step by step through the process of creating a Developer/2000- and Oracle-based application system. If you are familiar with previous versions of Designer/2000, these chapters will be very helpful as an introduction to the major features and enhancements of Designer/2000, version 2. The remaining four chapters of this part present the architecture of Designer/2000 and the tasks related to the creation and maintenance of application systems in the Repository. They also discuss patterns of working with two interface components of Designer/2000: object navigators and diagrammers.
  
• Part Two. This part focuses on the use of Designer/2000 as a set of tools that facilitate strategic planning and business area analysis of the enterprise. Chapters in this part show you how to model the business direction of the enterprise by recording critical information, such as business units, goals, objectives, problems, and critical success factors. They also discuss the Designer/2000 tools used to document and maintain the enterprise high-level business, functional, and data models. A major theme of this part is the use of the Process Modeller to facilitate the analysis and reengineering of business processes in the enterprise.
  
• Part Three. This part covers the use of Designer/2000 tools, such as the Function Hierarchy Diagrammer and the Entity Relationship Diagrammer, to define, analyze, and record the requirements of an information system. Its primary focus is techniques and methods used during requirement analysis, data modeling, and business rule modeling activities. It also describes several Repository reports provided by Designer/2000 to help you ensure the quality of the system requirements you have identified in the application system.
  
• Part Four. This part is dedicated to the transition from the requirements of a system to the database and module design, as well as to the enhancements of these designs in preparation for the generation of software modules. Separate chapters in this part discuss the Database Design Transformer and the Application Design Transformer—the two Designer/2000 components that allow you to convert the information captured during the requirement analysis into logical database structures and software module designs. Other chapters cover the use of the Design Editor—a component of critical importance among all the Designer/2000 tools—to enhance the logical data model, create a physical implementation of it in one of several target databases supported by Designer/2000, and implement a number of business rules using constraints. The maintenance and enhancement of software modules in the Design Editor is also discussed in detail in its own separate chapter.
  PL/SQL, the procedural extension of SQL by Oracle Corporation, is a very important part of any Oracle-based information system. It is the programming language for the Oracle Server, Developer/2000, and Oracle WebServer; therefore Designer/2000 fully supports it.
  Two chapters in Part IV discuss PL/SQL. One of them presents an overview of the language and provides examples of its most important syntactic structures and concepts. The other discusses the creation and maintenance of PL/SQL objects in the Designer/2000 Repository.
  
• Part Five. This part discusses the use of the Design Editor to generate the database server objects and the front-end modules that are part of an application system. Separate chapters in this part discuss the Server Generator component and the front-end generators of multiple flavors. Two chapters are dedicated to the enhancement and generation of Developer/2000 Form modules. They are organized as workshops with instructions you can follow and examples you can try yourself. The last chapter of this part describes the C++ Object Layer Generator, the Designer/2000 tool that allows you to create a layer of C++ classes that encapsulate and hide the complexity of the relational model of the database from object-oriented programming environments.
  
  

Audience

Designer/2000 is a suite of tools with a broad functionality that can be used throughout the Information Technology (IT) spectrum. Since Inside Oracle Designer/2000 covers each of these tools, people in a number of areas will benefit from it. In particular, you will find the book helpful if your job requires you to play one of the following roles:

• Business process modeler. People interested in modeling business processes of the enterprise and BPR will learn how Designer/2000 supports these activities in the Process Modeller tool.
  
• Data modeler. IT professionals who perform data analysis will learn how to model entities, relationships, and data-related business rules with the Entity Relationship Diagrammer and other Designer/2000 tools.
  
• System modeler. The book shows an efficient way to capture the functional requirements of the system using the Function Hierarchy Diagrammer, and the benefits of separating user interface requirements from business rules that the system will implement.
  
• Database architect. Database architects will see how the Database Design Transformer helps translate the logical data model into a complete database schema and how data-related business rules are implemented and stored declaratively using the Design Editor.
  
• System architect. System architects will learn to use the Application Design Transformer to generate the initial modules and components of the system. They will see how the Design Editor helps them manage the complex relationships between system components, and maintain the properties of each module.
  
• Database developer. Database developers will learn the basics of PL/SQL, the Oracle Server programming language, and how to use the Design Editor to design and implement stored PL/SQL program units and database triggers. In addition, they will learn to use the Server Generator to create and install the database objects in a physical database.
  
• Application developer. Oracle application developers will see how the Design Editor helps them define the layout and functionality of screen and report modules and how to generate software applications for different environments, such as Developer/2000 and Oracle WebServer. Microsoft Windows developers will learn how to generate a set of C++ objects that can be used to develop Visual C++ applications, and how to generate Visual Basic applications from the Designer/2000 repository.
  

The Companion CD-ROM

Inside Oracle Designer/2000 is first and foremost a hands-on guide to the use of Designer/2000 tools, and you should read it as such. I strongly urge you to follow the discussion of different topics in the book by performing the activities with one or more application systems in your environment. In order to help you with these activities, I have provided a CD-ROM that contains a number of application systems that you can load in your Repository, as well as Lotus ScreenCam movies you can play. Designer/2000 version 2.0.8 (Beta) was used to produce the application systems and record the movies. I discuss the contents of the CD-ROM in the following two sections. The last page in this book shows you how to use the CD- ROM.



Software

To help you understand the topics discussed in Inside Oracle Designer/2000, the companion CD-ROM contains sample applications discussed throughout the book. The intention of the provided software is to allow you to perform in your environment the most important activities discussed in this book. This software is organized by application systems covered in the book. A list of these applications follows:

• Introductory ORDERS Application. This is the application system ORDERS discussed in Chapters 1, 2, and 3.
  
• Enterprise Strategic Analysis. This is the application system STRATEGIC ANALYSIS discussed in Chapters 8, 9, and 10.
  
• Process Order Model. This is the application system PROCESS ORDERS discussed in Chapter 11.
  
• Reengineered Process Order Model. This is the application system REENG PROC ORD discussed in Chapter 12.
  
• Order Management System Requirements. This is the application system TASC OMS (REQ) discussed in Chapters 13, 14, and 15.
  
• TASC 3NF Data Model. This is the application system TASC 3NF discussed in Chapter 14. It contains the data model for TASC's order management business area in the Third Normal Form.
  
• Sales Analysis System Data Model. This is the application system TASC SAS discussed in Chapter 14. It contains the data model for TASC's Sales Analysis System.
  
• Order Management System Design. This is the application system discussed in Chapters 17 through 25.
  
• Order Management System Development. This is the application system discussed in Chapters 27 and 28.
  

Lotus ScreenCam Movies

To help you understand the topics discussed in Inside Oracle Designer/2000, I provide the most important actions you will encounter in the form of Lotus ScreenCam movies. You will find over 170 of these movies for a total duration of over 3 hours. To help you access them more easily, the movies are organized by parts and chapters of the book. The movies provided on the CD-ROM are not recorded with sound. However, a script describes the most important activities that occur during the movie.

In order to view the movies, you need to download from the CD-ROM the ScreenCam Player application and store it in a folder on your PC. Versions of ScreenCam Player for Windows 95 and for Windows NT are available. You need to use the one that matches your environment. For the latest version of the ScreenCam Player application, visit the Web site of Lotus Development Corporation at ....

After you download the ScreenCam Player, launch it and open any of the movies provided on the CD-ROM. While the movie is playing, you may press the space bar to pause it. Pressing the space bar again resumes the movie. You can view the movies provided with Inside Oracle Designer/2000 two ways. The most traditional one is to browse the movie directory until you find the movie you want to view. Using the Web browser, save the movie file to your PC and view it using ScreenCam Player.

The easiest way is to configure ScreenCam Player as a helper application for your Web browser that is launched each time you click one of the movie hyperlinks. The following are the actions you need to perform with Netscape Navigator:

1. Select Options General Preferences.
   
2. Click the Helpers tab in the Preferences dialog box.
   
3. Click New Type. . . . Enter application' in the Mime Type field, ScreenCam' in the Mime SubType field, and click OK.
   
4. Enter scm' in the File Extensions field.
   
5. Select the radio button Launch the Application and provide the full path of the ScreenCam Player executable in the text box.
   
6. Click OK to close the Preferences dialog box.
   

The following are the steps required to achieve the same thing in Microsoft Internet Explorer:

1. Select View Options . . . and click the Programs tab.
   
2. Click the button File Types . . . in the group Viewers.
   
3. Click New Type . . . in the dialog box File Types to display the dialog box Add New File Type.
   
4. Enter scm' in the field Associated extension.
   
5. Type application/ScreenCam' in the field Content Type (MIME).
   
6. Click New to add an action.
   
7. Type open' in the Action field.
   
8. Provide the full path of the ScreenCam Player executable in the text box.
   
9. Click OK until all the dialog boxes are closed.
   

Questions and Comments

I welcome any questions or comments you may have about Inside Oracle Designer/2000. You can send them directly to my Compuserve email account 102630.2211@compuserve.com. I strongly suggest that you periodically visit my Web home page at .... There you will find answers to the most frequently asked questions about Inside Oracle Designer/2000, as well as a list of updated software assets of the CD as they become available.