Using Favorites as a Custom Schema Browser

Often in TOAD, you need to work with the same group or groups of objects. For example, you might only need to routinely work with the production tables for CUSTOMER and EMPLOYEE, their indexes and views. So you would like to have a customized Schema Browser for just those objects. TOAD offers the Favorites tab so that you can easily and quickly work in this manner. It can be a huge productivity enhancer . But far too often people don't seem to know about this feature's existence, and thus are working harder than they really need to. You merely need to set it up, define your favorites, and then begin using it as your customized schema browser.

Setting Up for Successful Favorites Usage

Before attempting to use favorites, you must spend a moment to set up some basic prerequisites for successful favorites usage. The first thing you need to do is to enable the Schema Browser Favorites tab as shown in Figure 2.24. Of course this same logic allpies to all the other Schema Browser tabs as well, meaning that you cannot use or otherwise reference tabs which are not actively being displayed.

Figure 2.24. Enabling favorites.

But that's only the beginning. Because you really want to use the Favorites tab as a customized Schema Browser, you also probably want that tab to be your primary focus (that is, when you open a Schema Browser, it starts on that tab). To accomplish this, you must select the Configure option shown in Figure 2.24 in order to open the Configure Browser Tabs window shown in Figure 2.25.

Figure 2.25. TOAD Schema Browser ”favorites first.

Here you should select the Favorites Tab entry and repeatedly click the "^" button in order to move it to the top of the list, thus making the Favorites tab the initial tab of focus for the Schema Browser. Finally, you must then visit the Favorites tab and create some new favorites folders using the Add New Folder to the Favorites button (that is, the folder with a plus sign) as shown in Figure 2.26. For this scenario, the Production Work folder will be the destination.

Figure 2.26. Adding favorites folders.

Selecting Your Favorites Tab Entries

With the basic prerequisites for successful favorites usage in place, you must now define what constitutes your favorites. This is done simply by creating named favorites folders that contain all those items selected from the Schema Browser and then added as entries to that folder. Those items can be from the same or different schemas. However, all the items must be from the same connection. That is, you cannot pick items from different schema browsers and thus different connections to be placed within the same favorites folder. Note that the new Projects window added to TOAD in version 7.4 addresses this limitation (however, this radically new feature is still in a state of flux at this time and therefore not covered by this edition of the book).

Returning to our example, you now need to add the EMPLOYEE and CUSTOMER related tables, views, and indexes to your Production Work favorites folder. So you need to visit the respective tabs, select the items you want to add as favorites, and then specify which folder to add them to. Making use of the Schema Browser's multi-select for context menu options, you can quickly and easily accomplish this task.

For example, to add the CUSTOMER and EMPLOYEE tables to your favorites, you would multi-select them as shown in Figure 2.27 and specify to add them to the Production Work favorites folder as shown in Figure 2.28. You would then simply repeat this process for each tab that contained objects you wanted to select for addition to your favorites folder. After you've created and populated your favorites folder in this manner, you now have a completely customized Schema Browser from which to work (as discussed in the next section).

Figure 2.27. Adding favorite tables.

Figure 2.28. Selecting a favorite folder.

Using Favorites as Your Schema Browser

With the prerequisites for favorites usage ”your Favorites folder and its item selections ”in place, you are now ready to start using the Favorites tab as your customized Schema Browser as shown in Figure 2.29.

Figure 2.29. Using favorites.

Note how it displays the schema, object type, and object name . This clearly shows that you can select from various schemas and tabs in order to populate this list. Plus, note how the object type drives the right-hand-side (RHS) detailed display. Thus when you select a table, the RHS side looks the same as if you were on the Tables tab, and so on for each object type. Plus, the object type likewise controls the context menu options displayed for an entry as shown in Figure 2.30. So again, it's as if you were on the tab of interest and seeing the menu options normally available. For small to mid- sized groupings of objects, this is definitely the most efficient method of working within TOAD. However, as the list of items in your Favorites folder grows, you do reach a point where just using the Schema Browser with filters becomes a viable option. Of course, that threshold will be different for different people.