Table of Contents
The support tables are those tables that define various codes used as data values in other tables. They define the controlled vocabulary used elsewhere in the system. The formulation of the available vocabulary is, for the most part, up to the users of Babase. This provides a great deal of flexibility in the information Babase records without requiring any programmatic or other alteration to the Babase system itself. New code values can be added to the system and used in the data by adding new rows to the support tables. The system validates the new code values in the data tables against the rows of the support tables allowing new types of data to be recorded without requiring changes to the Babase system.
Some of the vocabulary in the support tables has special meaning to Babase. All values that have a special meaning to Babase are noted in each table's documentation. Care must be taken when making changes in these cases or Babase will break. See the Special Values section for further information.
Most support tables contain only two columns, a key or id
column, that usually has the same name as the column in the tables
for which the support table defines vocabulary, and a column
called Descr. The key column contains the valid code values, and
the Descr column contains a short description of the code. Both
the key column and the Descr column must contain values that are
unique among all the values of all the rows in the respective
column. Neither the key column nor the Descr column may be
NULL. Neither key key column nor the Descr
column may be empty, contain no characters. Neither the key
column nor the Descr column may contain nothing but spaces.
Some support tables contain one or more additional columns. These are described in the section devoted to the table at hand.