I'm positively surprised that Data Modeler was able to reverse engineer one of my complex Databases, that have been developed since many years by a customer of ours. This DB has certainly a couple of oddities, but Data Modeler just processed it. Even the exported Delphi class file compiled without any problems.
The only thing I am missing (I couldn't find anything in the manual), is pluralization/singularization support.
Many DB designs are using Table names in Plural, whereas I am expecting the model entities (and the generated classes) to be in singular.
Hi Olaf, thanks for the compliments, I'm glad all worked well.
About plural/singular, well, yes, I have run in such case here as well. Problem is... it's complex isn't it? It's not that simple to turn english words into singular - what about non-english names? One could have a table named "Feet" and the class should be "TFoot" ;)
Anyway, that's why you are able to manually define the name of the class for each table. That's how it should be right now. Data Modeler saves your settings, so once you define that class name for "Customers" table is "TCustomer", it's done and it will use that from now one.
Maximum we could do is add an option "remove trailing 's'" but I don't think it sounds well, and actually as I said you have the custom name option.
Sure, I know, this is non-trivial and that this would be reasonable for English only. Removing trailing "s" would be a start at least. I think that should be easy to implement as an option for the export.
In fact, for creating the DB from the model might need the same thing. If I designed a TCustomer entity, then I'd actually expect this to end up as "Customers" table in my SQL server.
"TPerson to People" or even "TQuery to Queries" translations are obviously more complex and need a dictionary driven approach. I am going to send you a code snippet that would basically do that.