ENABLE User's Guide

SECTION 3
DEVELOPING, DESCRIBING, AND CREATING A DATA BASE
If the information your department uses is already stored in an
existing data base, you can use that data base when you generate
your ENABLE applications. If such a data base does not already
exist, you must describe and create one before using ENABLE to
generate an application to maintain it.
The discussion below follows the step-by-step process used to
describe and create the data base files used for many of the
examples in this guide. This sample data base comprises two
files that store information used by a personnel department.
DEVELOPING A DATA BASE
Since many users of ENABLE also use ENFORM to obtain reports, the
approach described in the following paragraphs results in a data
base that can be used by ENFORM as well as ENABLE.
Briefly, the tasks involved in developing the sample personnel
data base are:
1. Identifying the classes of information in which the personnel
department is interested. (Each class of information will be
a data base file.)
2. Listing the characteristics (or items) of data associated
with each class of information. (Each data item will be a
field within its associated file.)
3. Drawing a diagram of the relationships between the classes of
data
3-1