A CASE Tool for Object-Oriented Database Design

Abstract

There have been many CASE tools developed for designing Relational Database applications. However, not many CASE tools exist for designing Object-Oriented Database (00DB) applications. A key difference is that OODBs have methods or operations in addition to the data structures; hence, an Automatic Code Generation module is needed for such a CASE tool. This paper describes algorithms that embed the integrity constraints into the methods so that automatic constraint checking is done when any of the basic methods are invoked. The basic methods we consider are the constructor (for creating new objects of a class), destructor (for removing objects), modifier (for modifying attribute or instance variables), relator (for relating objects), and unrelator (for removing object relationships). The CASE tool has a Graphical User Interface (GUI) which takes an Enhanced Entity-Relationship (EER) schema as an input and creates a textual representation of EER schema objects. This is then transformed and stored in the CASE tool directory and an Automatic Code Generation program generates code skeletons for generic methods (operations) for the object classes. Automatic Code Generation program generates the code for the ODE object-oriented DBMS classes after mapping from the EER to an OO schema.