The purpose of perspectives is to make it easier to work with an instance that contains a lot of objects. In instances with a lot of objects, it can be hard to maintain a good overview and find an individual object quickly.
A perspective is a subset of the objects within an instance that relate to a specific area. For example, you could create a “finance” perspective that contains all the tables that are related to finance. When this perspective is active, anything else outside this subset of objects will be hidden.
A perspective can be static or dynamic. In dynamic perspectives, any object that is related to an object already in the perspective will automatically be included in the perspective.
Add or Edit a Perspective
Expand the instance, and right-click on Perspectives. Select Add/Edit Perspectives.
Select Add in the Perspectives window.
Rename a Perspective
Double-click Perspective header, and provide a new name (e.g. “Finance”)
Adding Objects to a Static Perspective
Leave the Dynamic perspective checkbox unchecked. Click the + sign next to a object type, to expand the node you would like to select an object from (e.g. Tables). Mark the checkboxes for the objects you would like to include in the perspective (e.g. “Org.CleanCurrency”). A perspective can include many object types including tables, fields, tables, views, schemas, stored procedures, etc.
Adding Objects to a Dynamic Perspective
Ensure that the Dynamic perspective checkbox is checked. Select the checkboxes for the objects you would like to include in the perspective. Notice that when the table “Org.CleanCurrency” is explicitly selected, a number of other objects are automatically selected as well since they are related/mapped to the “CleanCurrency” table. These implicitly included objects are marked by a dot, whereas explicitly included objects such as “CleanCurrency” are noted by a checkmark.
Note: Only objects that are explicitly selected in a dynamic perspective can be removed from the perspective. In other words, if an object is implicitly included in the dynamic perspective, and is marked by a dot, then it cannot be removed.
Activating the Perspective
Right-click on the perspective and select Use Dynamic Perspective
Once the perspective has been activated, it will say (Active) next to the name of the perspective. You will only see the objects that are included in the perspective.
Deactivating the Perspective
Right-click the perspective and uncheck Use Dynamic Perspective selection to deactivate the perspective. The (Active) text next to the perspective name now disappears, and all objects in the instance are once again displayed.
Sorting objects in a perspective
Objects within a perspective can be sorted by the execution order or alphabetically. To change the sort order of the active perspective, right-click the currently active perspective and select either Sort by execution order or Sort alphabetically. The chosen sort order will be saved for each perspective.
For example, if a data area contains the following tables. Then an unmanaged execution of this data area, would execute these tables top to bottom. The tables can be rearranged by dragging and dropping them in the data area to control the unmanaged execution order.
Perspectives are sorted alphabetically by default.
An alphabetic sorting would result in the following order of tables
Whereas sort by execution order would result in the following order of tables
Note: It is not possible change the order of objects manually while a perspective is active. In other words, when a perspective is active, it is not possible to drag and drop tables or objects to rearrange them. The perspective first has to be deactivated in order to rearrange the order of the objects.
Deploying and executing a perspective
Perspectives can be deployed and executed just as other objects. This enables you to easily work with a subset of your instance from source to execution. You can deploy and/or execute a perspective in two ways:
- In the Solution Explorer, under Perspectives, right-click the perspective you want to deploy and/or execute and click Deploy, Execute or Deploy and Execute.
- You can also add a perspective to an execution package to schedule the execution of the objects contained in the perspective.
