How do you Export single applications in Oracle*CASE ?

Hi folks. I was just curious as to how people export single models (so called applications) from CASE*Dictionary when various elements are shared. Here's my situation:

We have a central application, call it MAIN, with all of the entites and attributes, relationships and functional hierarchy for the entire model. We did not want to have to implement the entire model all at once so we created another application, call it APP. We then used the shared elements screen to share various entites from MAIN into APP.

Then we worked on generating forms and reports from APP. All is fine with this and we can safely ignore other parts of MAIN which we don't want to deal with right now.

Here's the problem: We are collaborating with another group who would like to use just our "APP" application. A few weeks ago, I exported just the MAIN application and imported it onto their machine. At that time, we both agreed not to touch anything in the MAIN application but we did not actually FREEZE the version.

After a few weeks, they decided they would like to use our APP application as well so I exported JUST THE APP aaplication. When I imported this into their CASE*Dictionary, I ended up with a new application called 01MAIN along with APP and the original MAIN. It seems that since I exported just the APP application, and it had references back to MAIN, the Case tool created a substitute application called 01MAIN (which is Frozen BTW), to take along for the ride. Now, on their machine, the APP application has references back to the 01MAIN application, not back to the MAIN application. Changes made to MAIN will not affect their APP application.

One solution would be to change all of the references back to MAIN instead of 01MAIN. This seems tedious at best.

Any suggestions ? (aside, that is from not doing this!)

Here's how I tried to explain it to some others:

     Application                 Application
     APP                         MAIN
     --------------              -----------------

       Linked                       Native Entites
       Entites
   
      material   ----------->       material
      material lot  ---------->     material lot
         etc.

When exporting the APP application, the pointers back to the MAIN application would be "broken". To keep the entity information needed in the APP, the export utility creates some references back to a "new" application called '01MAIN'. This application contains all of the entity information APP needs i.e. the same entities it is "borrowing" via the shared elements.

When importing, the APP application comes in fine but brings along with it a new '01MAIN' which is set up and then FROZEN so no one can modify it.

The trouble is, now all of our APP references are back to '01MAIN' instead of 'MAIN' so any changes made to MAIN will not be reflected in APP.

    more thinking to be done . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Rich Holowczak
Rutgers University
holowcza_at_andromeda.rutgers.edu Received on Wed Sep 22 1993 - 20:39:47 CEST