Introduction

The visual database designer plugin was designed and created to be used with the student engineers at Eseo, école d’ingénieurs. Who as part of their training use the Oracle database. In their second year of the engineer course (BAC+4, equivalent to final year honours degree), they learn SQL and need to design and implement a relational database.
First they need to model the database in merise and in UML to compare and contrast these two separate approaches. Already they use the netbeans plugin for UML, and so we designed a simple drawing package as a plugin for netbeans (using the visual library). This allows the creation of merise entity association diagrams, plus these diagrams can be exported.

To follow up from this, the plugin also allows the ability to visually design the database and table structures using the datatypes that are available in Oracle. Relations between tables can be drawn (only to fields marked as primary keys and as long as the datatypes match). Once completed, the diagram can again be exported to an image file to be printed out, and the plugin can also generate the sql code needed to create the tables on an oracle database.

This plugin, was created predominantly as a proof of concept and to learn the XMLMultiview API. As time permits, this plugin will be extended to offer tighter integration and more functionality. Special thanks goes to Toni Epple and Damir Tesanovic for their tutorials which helped in starting this project.

Using the Plugin

The plugin does not create a new project type, instead it allows users to add two new file types to their projects.

Merise Entity Association Diagrams

This video represents the steps taken to create a simple Merise entity Association Diagram.

Visual SQL Editor

The second file type allows the physical structure of a database to be modeled (including the different data types).

This video represents the steps taken above to create a simple Database using the Visual Database editor.

Richard WOODWARD juin 2009 (updated aout 2009)

What's new in this version

updated: Improved drawing code for associations in merise diagrams updated: colour uniformly implemented and editable from options menu updated: generation of code stops gracefully when mutually referenced tables have been designed.