Design Center

The Design Center is the primary place for designing, managing, and building your data integration solution. You access all other tools from this central user interface and perform all commands for selected objects from here. The navigators in the Design Center are tree structures from which you select and manipulate projects and the different kinds of objects such as data locations, relational and dimensional data objects, flat files, ETL mappings to move and transform data, process flows to coordinate sequences of tasks, data profiles, rules and auditors for managing data quality, and so on. The Design Center also serves as a way for you to learn about the various kinds of components you may use in your projects, and also enables you to easily launch wizards to create most of the common object types.

Design Center hosts a number of specific editors and tools for working with the different objects. Most tools feature contextual linking, so that as you are working on an object such as a process flow, you can easily open the relevant editors on objects such as ETL mappings referenced in the process flow.

shows the Design Center canvas laid out as it usually appears the first time you start using OWB. In this figure, the Start Page has been closed and the View menu is open to show some of the options for adding to the canvas.

Common Look and Feel with Oracle Application Development Framework

The Design Center user interface uses the Fusion Client Platform, the same core Integrated Development Environment (IDE) platform as Oracle JDeveloper and SQL Developer. The Design Center takes full advantage of usability research behind the Fusion Client Platform and provides developers with an environment that is consistent with other Oracle products.

Some of the productivity features of the Design Center and Java development environment are:

Global Search: A Global Search field can be used to search across the entire Design Center IDE and your project for a word or phrase.
Go to File: In addition to Go to Java Class (Alt+Minus), there is an option to Go to File (Ctrl+Alt+Minus) to enable you to quickly navigate to any file visible from your project.
Gallery: You can store global objects in named collections, called galleries. You can create new galleries as needed.

Accessing Commands for Selected Objects in the Design Center

The Design Center provides several ways of accessing commands for selected objects:

Right-click and select a command from the pop-up menu.
Select a command from one of the menus on the menu bar.
Click an icon on the toolbar.

Note:

After launching the Design Center, if classes cannot be found in their nominated directories, then the Messages area will have an Extended tab in addition to the Log tab. This tab will list as warnings those particular "errant" or missing classes. Two of these classes listed as missing can always be ignored: help-share and ohj.