Hackolade Studio includes the ability to maintain both a ‘business name’ and a ‘technical name’ for objects (containers, entities, and attributes.) To facilitate the maintenance of these 2 names, it is possible to keep them synchronized and transformed based on a set of user-driven parameters, and optionally based on a conversion file maintained outside of the application. Name conversion can go both directions: Business-to-Technical, or Technical-to-Business. Furthermore, when performing reverse-engineering, it is assumed that the database instance contains technical names, to be transformed in business names.

1. Hackolade Tutorial
Tutorial – Naming Conventions
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2. Background info
• Page in documentation
• Youtube video
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3. About Naming Conventions
• Hackolade Studio allows you to maintain a “business name” and a
“technical name” for your modeling objects
• Business names are more user friendly than technical names
• which may use abbreviations and letter case to fit technology needs
• If Naming Conventions are not enabled, Business Names are used by
default as Technical Names during forward-engineering
• You can automate the synchronization of both names based on
user-driven parameters and an optional conversion file
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4. About Naming Conventions
• Naming Conventions options
• disabled (default)
• Business-to-Technical name sync (fairly common)
• Technical-to-Business name sync (rare)
• When reverse-engineering, we assume that the physical target
contains the Technical names, to be transformed into Business names
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5. Naming conventions
• Configured in Tools >
Options > Naming
Conventions
• To enable: change value in
“Default name coupling”
to “Business-to-Technical”
• Rules are executed in
descending order in the
Options dialog:
• first files conversion,
• then Remove vowels,
• then Invalid characters
• then case conversion
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6. Conversion file
• not mandatory for naming
conventions – but often
used
• convenient to handle
abbreviations
• .csv file, minimum 2
columns, not case
sensitive, best saved in
UTF-8
• Can use text editor,
code editor, or
Spreadsheet program
to edit
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7. Conversion file – different levels
• The file works at different levels:
• Individual words
• Phrases:
• Combination of individual words
• Combination of words in the file
• Hackolade first matches phrases,
and then individual words
• Works with many longer phrases
• Example for snake_case:
• Customer à cust
• Account à acct
• Customer checking account à
cust_chk_acct
• Customer Account à cstacc
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8. Conversion parameters
• Are specific to each target
• Some targets do not accept
UPPERCASE
• Other targets recommend
camelCase
• RDBMS typically uses
snake_case
• Invalid characters vary from
target to target
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9. When making / applying changes to config
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10. In Properties Pane
• Relationship between business / technical name can have 3 states:
• OFF (default) – they are independent of each other
• Convert Business name to Technical name (business name = leading)
• Convert Technical name to Business name (technical name = leading)
• While name coupling is typically done at the model level, you may
also control individually for each object using the “=“ sign
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Not coupled (unpressed “=“ sign) Coupled B2T (pressed “=“ sign)
after Technical Name to make it
dependent on Business Name

11. Behavior during reverse-engineering
• If no coupling, then all object
names from the source are stored
in the “Business Name” property
• If coupling is either Business-to-
Technical, or Technical-to-
Business, the object names from
the source are stored in the
Technical Name property and
converted to Business Name
using the conversion parameter
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12. Clearing all technical names
• Setting coupling to NO will
• Allow you to maintain business and technical names on an individual basis,
if required
• If the Technical Name property is empty, the Business Name is used by default
as a Technical Name during forward-engineering
• Clear all technical name properties – be careful!
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13. Reading material
• See Hackolade online documentation
• The Hackolade Blog
• This excellent new book:
MongoDB Data Modeling & Schema Design
• Many of the principles in the book are related to query
driven modeling based on access patterns
• Hackolade’s on social media: LinkedIn page, Twitter page
• Download Hackolade Studio for free
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14. Questions?
Answers!
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