Attributes may have more forms than just an ID or a name. More often than not you'll find long descriptions, SKUs, Social Security Numbers, previous companies' codes still in use, and so on. Or, in the case of a customer, you may have an e-mail address that sometimes you want to use in a report. Those descriptive fields that uniquely refer to an element of an attribute can be used as alternate forms. When creating an alternate form, it is always useful to ask the question: is this a form or a totally different attribute? The customer's birthday, for example, would be a different attribute, since we may later filter or GROUP BY
this column; and surely does not uniquely identify a single customer.
You need to have completed the previous recipes to do this one. We are now adding the long description to the Product
attribute.
We are modifying the Product
attribute:
LDESC
and close this dialog clicking on the OK button. See that in the Attribute Editor now we have three forms.We can have as many forms as we want in an attribute, as long as they come from the same lookup table. Forms can be text, numbers, dates, or other datatypes. When it comes to displaying forms on a report, DESC will be always displayed by default (if present), and you will have the option to select which other forms are shown by right-clicking on an attribute header.
If you selected Read Only in step 2 in this recipe, the project schema is now locked. You won't be able to make changes until you unlock it. This is useful in development environments where multiple persons are working on the same metadata and you want to freeze the project.
To unlock it, use the Schema | Read Only Modeā¦ menu and uncheck the option.