Table of Contents

Overview

The Alias Management functionality provides you an easy and flexible way to manage data stored in a database. The Alias Management has simple interfaces to work with the data. That allows users to easily perform custom calculations on any data in the database.

Any kind and size of database can be managed via the Alias Management feature. Any data can be used and applied to any application screen or report once the database tables are created and their dependencies are established.

Alias Management Framework Usage

The Alias Management Framework can collect and process the data in two ways:

• based on the Primary Key dependency specified by the user (so called Primary Key Substitution),

• with the help of the Relations between the tables in the database, which can be specified by the user or auto-generated based on the certain rules.

To evaluate and to receive the required data, the user must provide input values and an output list of aliases for the requested values.

In the first iteration, the Alias Framework checks the output list and evaluates the aliases based on the given inputs.

In the second and next iterations, the Alias Framework uses the values of evaluated aliases to evaluate other aliases. To put that into perspective, the Alias Framework can be represented as tree branches where branches are aliases. And there are no limitations on how large the tree can be.

To improve and optimize the performance of the alias evaluating and to avoid reducing the calculation speed, the aliases can be processed in different threads. The user can define how many threads can be used.

Data Restrictions

After the evaluation, all aliases are additionally checked against the restrictions that are set up by the user when creating aliases. Depending on the defined restrictions, some data and information will be hidden from the user.

Alias Types

Currently, the following Alias Types are supported:

• Database field

The database field alias represents a single cell value from a specific table column and a row. The value that this alias will have corresponds to dependencies that the user specified and the input that was used to start the evaluation.

For more information open the Database Field page of the User Manual.

• Arrays

The arrays represent a subset of values from a specific table column the value that this alias will have corresponds to dependencies that the user specified and the input that was used to start the evaluation.

For more information open the Arrays page of the User Manual.

• Custom generated

The custom generated aliases represent single values that can be calculated either with an SQL query or inside an AF module. The custom alias can be dependent on other aliases, for example you might need one Database field alias and one Array alias to evaluate the custom alias. The custom alias will be evaluated only after the two other aliases are evaluated.

For more information open the Custom Generated page of the User Manual.

• Custom multi

The custom multi aliases represent multi values (column, array) that can be calculated either with an SQL query or inside an AF module. The Custom multi behaves in the same way as the custom generated with the only difference that can return an array (column) of values.

For more information open the Custom Multi page of the User Manual.

Alias Naming Convention

Database field and Array are named according to the fixed naming convention. The name convention depends on the Alias Type, Table name and Column name.

Custom generated can contain any name after Custom.*.* if they are evaluated with an SQL query. In case the evaluation is done with an Alias Framework Module, the alias name needs to correspond to the Library name and the Function that will evaluate the alias.

Custom generated can contain any name after Multi.*.* if they are evaluated with an SQL query. In case the evaluation is done with an Alias Framework Module, the alias name needs to correspond to the Library name and the Function that will evaluate the alias.

The Alias naming convention is represented in the following table: