Re: Pros/Cons of Oracle Designer

Designer is very good at defining the data model etc. It can be used to generate forms and reports, but it is more difficult that doing it in Developer than in Developer.

One of the benefits of Designer is that you can now put all the code [database triggers, procedures, and forms procedures and PLLs] in the repository. This means you can do impact analysis and tell what database objects AND what forms and reports REALLY use a column/table. With a good template and supporting libraries, you can generate a consistent application that is easy to update very quickly. [But it might take a while to develop those - look at Oracle's Headstart or other templates/libraries]. Oracle publishes an API to Designer; you can automate more of it, make new reports, etc

Downside- it takes a long time to learn - there are a lot of interconnections, and sometimes you have to do things to "fool" designer to make it behave the way you want. You can specify where items get placed, but the default unit is character cell, so there is not a lot of precision. (A gap of 0 or 1 between rows, not 1.5)

Overall, I think it is a good tool. With it, you avoid some of the nit-picking stuff that goes on in forms that eats up a lot of time - like positioning all the fields just right, writing a lot of standard code in each forms. etc.

There's a lot more (I just gave a short talk at my company that included Pros/Cons of Designer...), but I'm curious to see what others think...

Dan Hekimian-Williams Received on Tue Jul 25 2000 - 00:00:00 CEST