Schema name vs Display name

[Nicholas]

Hello all,

I was hoping to get some input on my situation. I'm exporting data into SQL Server from a database that has schema names and display names for every field / data item. The schema names are short, no spaces, database & query friendly. The display names are user friendly with spaces, special characters, sometimes lengthy, etc etc.

When I export I get the schema names. Right now when I'm building a data model for users, I inevitably go change the names to the user friendly display names. This can be extremely time consuming as some tables have 250+ fields. And if new fields are added, then I'll have to go rebuild the model and I assume rename everything again.

Does anyone have possible solutions they've come up with for similar situations?

Thanks,

Nicholas

[Lynn]

I use language translation capabilities to do this. Add a second language to the project, make it the active language and then do a translation using a spreadsheet that has the schema and display names in it side-by-side. If you can query the system tables from SQL Server it is easy to get a spreadsheet like that.

In my case I import the physical table in my database layer and leave it with the schema names. I drag the whole table in as a new model query subject and do the translation there. It is best to do it one table at a time.

[Nicholas]

I thought I replied back earlier to this thread but it looks like I forgot.  :-[


Thanks for the suggestion Lynn, but I took another route.

What I ended up doing was making table views for my database tables, using the display names there and pointing Cognos to the views.   I'm still manually renaming the schema names to display names in the view, but I only need to do it one time and now I'll have a script I can run. If columns need to be added later, I'll just add an additional line in the script and run it, then export the package in Cognos.

Hope that helps anyone else in a similar situation.