Managing Extended Properties

Managing your RDBMS' Extended Properties has never been easier. You can now Add/Edit, or Manage a new schema extended property directly inside of Schema Explorer.

This is a very powerful way to add custom meta-data to the already feature rich meta-data that Schema Explorer provides. You can now easily add database object descriptions, or anything that will help you drive your generation process using a powerful storage on the database server.

Managing Extended Properties

To manage your Extended Properties, simply open up the Schema Explorer window. You can open Schema Explorer by selecting the Schema Explorer menu item under the View menu in the Template Editor or Generator menu in Visual Studio.

In this example, we are going to open the Extended Property Editor for the AccountID column. This column is located under the Account tables' Columns folder; as depicted in the image above.

Once the Schema Explorer window is open, continue to expand nodes until you find the schema object you are looking for. In this example, we are going to open the Extended Property Editor for the AccountID column under the Accounts table as shown in the image above. To open the Extended Property Editor for the AccountID column, right-click on the schema object item and select Extended Properties.

The Extended Property Editor allows you to view, add, update or remove Extended Properties from any schema object.

Adding a new Extended Property

In this example we are going to add a new Extended Property to the Accounts tables' AccountID column. Please follow the steps in the section above for information on opening the Extended Property Editor for this column.

Some Extended Properties may already be defined and listed in the Extended Property Editor. These Extended Properties normally start with  "CS_" and "MS_", and are managed by the underlying Schema Provider. T

Finally, we will add a new Extended Property by typing an Extended Property Name in the first empty row. Please note that the row will always be at the bottom of the list and a * will be shown in first column. Next, you will need to specify a datatype of the extended property and value. Please see the section below for saving Extended Properties.

Saving Extended Properties

To save your Extended Property values, just click on the OK button. To ignore your changes click on the Cancel button.

Editing an Extended Property

You can edit an Extended Property value that is not marked as a read-only by editing the rows Value field.

Removing an Extended Property

You can remove an Extended Property by following one of the methods below.

• Start by right-clicking on a row and selecting the Delete menu item.
• Click on the row selector (first row) and press the Delete key.