Customizing Data Dictionary Columns

General Questions/Discussions
1

Hey y’all,

Is there any way to customize the columns that are published in a data dictionary? My business users do not need to know any of the metadata associated with a given table level data element (type, length, primary key, etc.) and these columns are taking up a lot of valuable real estate, causing the more relevant column ‘Column Description’ to be basically unreadable.

When the data dictionary is generated in a word doc, it renders a separate table for each page, so I’m unable to just manually delete the unneeded columns at once. I’ve also tried copying + pasting the whole data dictionary into excel to try and format it there, but that seems to be even more complicated than manually deleting columns from 300+ tables.

I read through the VP documentation to see if there’s any way to address this prior to generating the data dictionary, but the links I found didn’t help me do what I need. Has anyone else experienced this issue? Any recommendations for how to move forward?

2

Alternatively, the ability to publish directly to excel would greatly simplify things.

3

Hi mpeterson,

Thank you for your inquiry. Yes, you may consider exporting your ERD to Excel. Here are the steps:

  1. Open your ERD
  2. Under the “Project” menu, select Export > Active Diagram to Excel…
  3. In the Export window, enter the output path of your Excel file
  4. Select “Model type per sheet” or “Raw”
  5. Click Export

For Doc. Composer, you can create your own template to produce the content you want. The page below provides you with some ideas:
https://www.visual-paradigm.com/tutorials/doc-composer-customization.jsp

For more details, please read the User’s Guide:
https://circle.visual-paradigm.com/docs/document-production/doc-composer-element-templates/

Feel free to contact us if you need any help.

Best regards,
Jick Yeung