Friday, February 18, 2005
Using Edit - Hide/Show Items in Explorer
Using ApexSQL Edit, some of the things you can do to make your life less cluttered is to use the features of the application to hide information not relevant to what you are working on.
Edit provides several means to help clean up the clutter. One feature Edit provides is the ability to completely hide a database from the schema listing. How many of us have ever opened up model ot tempb to see what's in there. Basically these databases (and most likely master and msdb) just sit on the list of databases and take up room. Using Edit, you can right click on a database to bring up its context menu and pick the "Hide Database" option to remove the database from the listing. You can hide as many databases as you choose to. To make the hidden databases visible again you can right click on the server and choose the "Show All Databases" option.
Speaking of right clicking on the Server node, did you know you can print the schema treeview to printer. Simply right click on the server node and choose either print or print preview to view the treeview (as it currently appears now) and print it.
In addition to hiding databases, you can also add individual items within a database. There is not current UI to handle this, but you can add nodes to the Settings.xml file to have items excluded from the schema explorer.
The setting (you can have any number of excludes) takes a regular expression and will exclude anything that matches the RegEx value. For example, the following would exclude any object that started with sp_ (ie. system sprocs):
sp_\w*
Want to exclude those pesky dt_ tables:
dt_\w*
The items need to go in the Settings.xml file located in the main Edit directory underneath the Settings node, ie:
...
...
PLACE YOUR EXCLUDES HERE
...
The SchemaExcludes are a temporary feature until Edit can provide a full featured filtering system for displaying objects. The system we have planned will provide exclude and include plans with the ability to quickly switch between defined plans so you will be able to create filtering that includes all objects related to specific applications.
If you have a topic you would like to see explained in these Using Edit posts, please let us know through email or on the forums.
Thanks
Edit provides several means to help clean up the clutter. One feature Edit provides is the ability to completely hide a database from the schema listing. How many of us have ever opened up model ot tempb to see what's in there. Basically these databases (and most likely master and msdb) just sit on the list of databases and take up room. Using Edit, you can right click on a database to bring up its context menu and pick the "Hide Database" option to remove the database from the listing. You can hide as many databases as you choose to. To make the hidden databases visible again you can right click on the server and choose the "Show All Databases" option.
Speaking of right clicking on the Server node, did you know you can print the schema treeview to printer. Simply right click on the server node and choose either print or print preview to view the treeview (as it currently appears now) and print it.
In addition to hiding databases, you can also add individual items within a database. There is not current UI to handle this, but you can add
The
Want to exclude those pesky dt_ tables:
The
...
...
...
The SchemaExcludes are a temporary feature until Edit can provide a full featured filtering system for displaying objects. The system we have planned will provide exclude and include plans with the ability to quickly switch between defined plans so you will be able to create filtering that includes all objects related to specific applications.
If you have a topic you would like to see explained in these Using Edit posts, please let us know through email or on the forums.
Thanks
