Data diagrams

Data diagrams provide a way to visually explore and document the relationships between your tables in Axiom Software. It is important to understand these relationships when designing data queries and performing other setup activities.

For example, you may want to know information such as:

Which tables look up to the DEPT table?
Which tables does the GL2019 table look up to?
Which lookup columns do the tables GL2019 and Plan2019 have in common?
Does a relationship exist between the GL2019 table and the Region table?

It can be time-consuming to answer these questions by inspecting the individual table properties directly, and difficult to visualize the relationships—especially when dealing with multiple levels of lookups. By creating a data diagram, you can find the answers to these questions by dragging and dropping the tables you want to explore. Relationships between tables are visually marked with arrows so that you can see the direction of the relationship and also trace the connection through multiple tables if applicable.

For example, in the following diagram we can see that the data tables BGT2016 and GL2016 have lookup relationships to the reference tables ACCT and DEPT. The arrows show the direction of the relationship—for example, BGT2016 looks up to DEPT. Tracing the arrows through the DEPT table, we can also see that both data tables have a multiple-level lookup to the reference table Region, because the DEPT table has a lookup relationship to the Region table. This multiple-level lookup means that the Region table can be used when querying these data tables.

In addition to the visual representation of these relationships, the diagram can be explored further to better understand the specific columns involved in each lookup. For example, you can hover over a connection arrow to see the validated column and the lookup column represented by that arrow.

Diagrams can be used by table administrators as a hands-on tool to investigate table relationships, or the diagrams can be saved and shared with other users as a way to communicate and document table relationships.

The data diagram feature is available in the Axiom Software Web Client only. Although you can see saved data diagrams in the Data Diagrams Library in the Axiom Software Excel Client and Web Client and open the diagrams from that location, all viewing and editing of diagrams must be performed in the Web Client.

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