Documentation

The SelCtlDB application provides a large amount of the technical documentation needed for your staff or a later developer of your choosing to work productively with the database. We have typically found the frequent lack of such documentation to be a major obstacle when we’ve been engaged to work on a client’s database. Because of this, one of our major goals has been to supply enough technical documentation to avoid this problem when users of the SelCtlDB engage developers to work on their database.

This documentation typically includes:

Entity-Relationship Diagrams: Diagramatic representations of data subjects and the relationships defined between them. One of the most frequently used database design tools. Despite the common use of E-R Diagrams, they are almost never made available by providers of off-the-shelf proprietary databases.
Data Model Report: An extremely detailed report showing the characteristics of all tables, columns, and relationships defined in the "server" database. Typically, this is provided in a HTML format allowing very speedy movement to appropriate sections of the report.
User Guide: Text document providing a general explanation of the database contents and features. Typically targeted to a standard user rather than a technical user.
Developer Guide: Text document providing a more technical explanation of the database contents, features, mechanisms employed by the database, and heavily used programming references. High level descriptions of naming conventions, class modules, form characteristics, etc. are provided. This is the actual development document used during design phase of the databaase development project - it is not completely accurate for later implementations of the database, but should nonetheless prove very useful to any developer engaged to work on the database.
Form Module Modification Instructions: Outlines the specific steps needed for a developer to modify a "record selection" form making use of the SelCtl class modules provided with MS-Access implementations of the database.
Form Navigation Diagrams: Flowchart-style diagrams outlining the major user navigation paths supported by the database. These documents can provide a very fast comprehension of the application's major user navigation approach.

Last modified: 14:14:29 23-Jan-2009