Extending Objects

PowerDesigner includes powerful tools to extend and customize your modeling objects. Many extensions are defined in the resource files that are provided with PowerDesigner to support a particular language or DBMS, and you can add your own to add new attributes and attribute lists to objects, create entirely new objects, and customize object generation.

Note: Many extended attributes are displayed in standard or custom property sheet tabs, but if any are not so assigned, an Extended Attributes tab will be displayed, listing all the extended attributes in alphabetical order and giving their datatypes, values, and a column, [R]edefined, in which the checkbox is selected if you have modified the attribute's default value.

For detailed information about working with extensions, see Customizing and Extending PowerDesigner > Extension Files.

Adding New Properties to an Object
To quickly add new properties to an object, use the dialogs available from the property sheet menu. Properties added to an object are available for all other objects of that type.
Extended Objects, Sub-Objects, and Links
Extended objects, sub-objects, and links let you model concepts that are not natively supported by PowerDesigner. For example, you can add extended objects to a PDM to model new database objects. You can specify generated files and templates in the definition of your extended objects in order to enable their generation and reverse-engineering.
Customizing the Generation of Files for an Object
In PowerDesigner, you can define a generated file on a selected metaclass (or stereotype or criterion), in this case a file is generated for each instance of the metaclass existing in your model.

Parent topic: Objects