Beside the straightforward use of the Universe Documenter for documenting list of objects, tables etc, it can help developer to speedup some verification tasks.

1. Some guys do not believe in automatic context detection and create contexts manually. In my experience if the database schema is designed properly and join cardinalities are set properly, automatic context detection works perfect. However when you are creating the first draft of the universe, cardinalities of some joins might be not set. In this case automatic context detection will prompt a warning “All Cardinalities are not set. The detection can be wrong or incomplete because of the unknown cardinalities “.

If the schema is complex, it might be difficult to see the join, and a solution is to go through all joins in List Mode and check that all join cardinalities are set. The other option is to run Universe Documenter, and check the column “Outer Join” on the worksheet “Joins” for value “Unknown”. This will indicate the wrong join.

2. You can define a custom tables for an object to force a join. This might be useful for example for performance optimization. The problem with this feature is that the tables are reset if you change anything in the object expression (even if this is just a space). If you have a lot of such objects it might be really difficult task to verify all them. Verification of each object requires several mouse clicks. It is too easy to miss an object. An option is to build a list of objects and check column “Tables” on the worksheet “Objects”.

3. TBW