How do I? Refactor into packages easily?

[Steven Herod]

Hi all.

I've just reversed engineered a large database with about 2000 tables/views in a single database.

Now I want to use EA to organise it into logical groupings, but the Project Explorer and dragging 10s of nodes up a list of 2000 items seems painful and error prone (actually, not 'seems' it just is painful).

Is there a better way?   EA seems quite weak at mass reorganization like this....

[Steven Herod]

I guess the answer is 'no' then....

[Yves C]

I remember that in Rose there is a nice way to do this. You can "relocate" classes from a diagram in its containing package. This kind of feature would be nice to add to ea. An idea for a new addin.

[Steven Herod]

I think Sparx could look more closely at Eclipse and duplicate some of its refactoring capabilities

Whilst its a great tool especially for the price, in terms of workflow, its actually faster to write Java code and reverse engineer it, than type up classes and methods in EA - and its simply a UI thing - a few small changes and it would be there....

[Yves C]

I agree with you. EA should be completed with all the functionalities that can be found in a good code management tool. That includes refactoring capabilities and other tools to analyze models, various metrics as well as a better vesion control system.
I hope that we can find some of  them in the next version.

[Thomas Mercer-Hursh]

What kind of clues do you have about which package each table belongs in?  If it is something a human needs to make a judgment call about, then it is going to be painful regardless.  But, if there is some property on which the decision can be made, you could always do this with code running directly against the database.  I do this in loading tables from OpenEdge by providing a hook in the load code where a site can identify the package for a table and then get the package and table created in the package.