This blog post represents a challenge that I set myself a while ago to generate a list of data entities with underlying tables. What I ended up coding was a way to generate a spreadsheet that contains all sorts of data that would be useful for easily finding appropriate data entities for specific tasks. Need to find a data entity for Arrival Groups (ITMArrivalGroupTable) that works with data management? No problem! Need a data entity for Retail Transaction Addresses (RetailTransactionAddressTrans) that can be accessed using ODATA? Piece of cake! How about a list of all data entities that can use multi-threading? You got it!
The spreadsheet can be downloaded here, and below you will find a list of the columns with a description of what the data represents.
AOT Name
This is the name of the data entity as shown in the AOT. It is also the name of the view that is created in SQL server.
Entity label
This is the name of the data entity as shown in the data management workspace.
Data management enabled
This shows whether the entity is enabled for use with data management.
Multithreading enabled
This shows whether it is possible to use multithreading with the entity as setup in entity execution import parameters. This can be found on the entity settings tab of the Data import/export framework parameters.
ODATA enabled
This shows whether the entity can be accessed using ODATA.
Staging table
This is the name of the staging table which is used with data management.
Read only
This shows whether the data entity is read only.
Entity collection name
This shows the name of the data entity when accessed using ODATA.
Entity field
This is the name of the field that is exposed on the data entity.
Entity field label
This is the label used for the field on the data entity.
Is mandatory
This shows whether the field is mandatory when creating a new record.
Datasource name
This is the unique name of the data source in the data entity. A lot of the time this is the same name as the underlying table.
Table name
This is the name of the table for the data source.
Table label
This is a more descriptive name for the table.
Field name
This is the name of the field on the table which is mapped to the entity field.
Field label
This is a more descriptive name for the field.
Is computed field
This shows whether the data for the entity field is generated using business logic instead of being mapped directly to a field on a table.
Data access modifier
This shows whether the entity field is accessible through ODATA or data management. Values can be public, private or Internal.
Is field in primary key
This shows whether the field forms part of the primary key for the entity.
String length
This shows the number characters that can be stored in the field if the field is of type String.
Data type
This is the type of data that is stored in the field.
I am planning on releasing the code for this in future, but at the moment it is very untidy and has more than a few best practice violations which I want to sort. In the mean time, please feel free to comment with any issues that you might find, features that you would like to see added, or even what I should be watching next on Netflix.