Reverse Engineering

Previous  Index  Next  How To Use

When selecting Reverse Engineer from the Tools button from the toolbar, Database Workbench will show you a "Select Session" dialog if there's multiple connection sessions or take the only session available at that moment.

 

The Tools button

 

Next, a dialog will pop up asking you if you want to reverse engineer a selection or all objects.

 

All objects or just a selection?

 

All objects will become available in the lists in the Diagram Explorer, but it depends on the option used if all objects will be added to the Canvas. If you select Selection in the above dialog, another window will be shown, allowing you to select a sub-set of the available tables and views.

 

Object selection dialog

 

Use the filter edit box to filter the list of objects, the object names have to contain what's in the filter, if not, they will be left out.

 

When reverse engineering, the (selected) tables will be added to the Editor Canvas automatically and foreign key constraints will be made visual by a line.

 

After this process, the Diagram Editor will attempt to automatically arrange the items in the Canvas, for an example, click the below thumbnail to expand.

 

A reverse engineered database

 

This is an ideal method to document your database: you get a clear overview of the relationships in your database and you can freely move, group and otherwise organize database objects.