If your data dictionary has a lot of tables and fields, the user may have a long list to choose from in step 2 of the report wizards. While data groups can help, there still may be hundreds of fields in any one table, making it difficult for the user to know which fields to select. To make matters worse, a lot of these fields may contain default or even no data; for example, the fields may be there to support certain features in the program, but the user may not use those features.

To make things easier for the user when you have a system like this, turn on the Enable Table/Field Favorites setting. This has the following effects:

• The Stonefield Query Tools menu has a new Analyze Database function. This function goes through the selected database, looking at all fields in all tables for fields containing more than a single unique value, and marking those as "favorite." This "favorite" setting is stored in a new table called FAVORITES in the same folder as the project files are installed. This may take some time to run, depending on the size of the database. For example, a database with 1000 tables and 35000 fields and tens of thousands of records took about two minutes to run.

• Step 2 in the report wizards has a new Show Only Favorites option. If the user turns this on, the table and field lists show only those tables and fields that are marked as "favorites;" that is, those that contain meaningful data.
  

In a future release, we'll support a mechanism for you and the user to select which are favorite tables and fields.

See Also
Configuration Settings