What You Can Do With a Synonym

Once you have generated a synonym, you can report against the synonym using all of the Developer Studio reporting tools. In many instances, the configured adapter and the generated synonym are all you need to access your data and create reports and graphs.

However, you may wish to enhance the synonym in order to implement particular capabilities that are supported in the WebFOCUS data description language. To do this, you can use a second data description tool, the Synonym Editor.

When you use the Synonym Editor, there is no need to know the data description language. The graphical tool displays all viewable and editable attributes of the synonym components. If you make changes to the generated synonym, the Synonym Editor validates your entries and displays messages if they violate the underlying syntax of the data description language.

Note: If you are comfortable working directly with code, you can open the synonym components in a text editor. While the text editor does some error checking, we cannot guarantee that code which is altered manually will be syntactically correct. We strongly recommend that you use the text editor as a viewing tool, and to make your enhancements through the graphical Synonym Editor interface. For detailed information about the underlying syntax, see the Describing Data With WebFOCUS Language manual.


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