Apr 17 2009

Integrity Check Improvement

Categories: Universe Design Dave Rathbun @ 9:17 am

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could run an integrity check on your universe and click a box that says to only check objects changed since last export?

I tried to see if there was a way to write this in VBA, but there doesn’t appear to be a “last changed date” attribute on objects. I have been working on a Change Log script, and I could integrate the two, but that seems like overkill. I would have to maintain an unchanged copy of the universe in order to do the compare, then run the compare and capture the differences, and finally run an integrity check on that subset of objects.

It’s probably easier just to start the check on the entire universe and go to lunch…

3 Responses to “Integrity Check Improvement”

  1. Comment by Mark

    It would certainly be useful. The ebi version manager appears to have some kind of difference tool. I say that from looking at the product marketing info.

    you could reuse one of the downloads on Bob to get the list of objects and their formulae.
    I think Dwayne from EDS? wrote an Excel based utility to read objects and allow their descriptions to be edited.

    I think there are other versions that allow you to see the associated formulea as well. Sadly you can’t get at the object formats as this is stored as binary data in the universe. When I queried BO about the general lack of being able to get info about objects via APIs they said that it would make it too easy for competitors to write converters 🙁

  2. Comment by James Halligan

    Hi Dave,

    I’d like a button that allowed you find those joins where the cardinality hadn’t been set….

  3. Comment by Dustin

    Part of the integrity check it so see if the objects are in sync with the database. Even if you know the universe objects didn’t change, you don’t necessarily know if the database definition of the column has changed. (Example: The column table.ZIP was changed from Numeric to Character.) Thus, the tool needs to Parse each object to validate it against the table.