User Maintained Tables option specifies whether a database table is reorganized by the user or by the system during deployment. This option is available for persistent AB Suite entities such as Ispecs (tables), Profiles (indexes), Events and Classes with no stereotype. Marking an AB Suite entity as ‘User Maintained’ ensures that AB Suite deployment would not create or modify the related database structures. These structures are not available to Administration Client for modification.

If an Ispec is marked as user-maintained, the profiles under that Ispec also become user-maintained.

Database Reorganization

The database reorganization facility creates DDLs for persistent AB Suite entities but will not process user-maintained entities. The reorganization application will not create, alter or drop the user-maintained entities for SQL Server. This is also applicable in the case where a system is deployed after an import, since database reorganization normally creates the database at this time. In case of a new deployment, the reorganization application ignores all user-maintained database objects while preparing the reorganization plan.

An on-demand consistency check option is provided by the Runtime Administration to ensure that the database structures created by the process of database reorganization are equivalent to the actual structures AB Suite expects to be present. The functionality accepts a database table or view as long as it contains the minimum number of columns that AB Suite expects.

It is possible for a component marked as user-maintained to be reverted back to being AB Suite-maintained. In this case, the consistency check should be made to see that the related database structures are in a form that exactly matches the form that AB Suite would have produced had they been AB Suite-maintained in the first place.

During the actual database reorganization process, the application uses DatabaseSchema.XML and the current database schema to generate a new physical schema on the target machine. DatabaseSchema.XML contains information on the user-maintained AB Suite entities. This information helps the reorganization application create appropriate database structures and avoid schema mismatches.