What are the differences between code view and design view?

Code view

Script Editor (code view) provides a comprehensive environment for creating all scripts that were not created in the design view:

Script Editor enables you to write or edit your own report scripts if you are familiar with the JavaScript and ARIS Script programming languages. If you have no experience in writing scripts, you can create simple report scripts as template-based reports in the design view.

ARIS is supplied with numerous standard scripts. We generally recommend documenting all changes to scripts externally so that the documentation can be used to ensure that they are incorporated correctly during the update process.

Reports/Macros/Report templates and files

Do not make any changes to the standard scripts we supply. Always adapt copies of report, macro, and JS files, and any other files. There are exceptions, for example, the file atsall<language code>.js.

When updating ARIS, all ARIS standard scripts and files are overwritten and customer-specific changes to these files are discarded. Copied scripts and files and those you have created yourself are not overwritten.

If you have changed files we supplied but not copied them, before the update (updatesystemdb) they must be exported and then imported after the update. This enables you to retain your adapted standard scripts from the previous version. However, in this case you do not receive any corrections or updates to the files we supplied.

Semantic checks

We recommend creating custom rule types and custom profiles for semantic checks, in which the ARIS standard rule types and rules are referenced.

This is not possible for configurable rule types (relationship attribute rules, model attribute rules, object attribute rules, existence rules, and allocation rules). If you have added rules to these rule types, you must export the rule types before the update and then import them after the update.

In contrast to template-based reports, you can also provide user-defined evaluation scripts as interactive report scripts or provide them as semantic checks. These scripts allow write access to databases to analyze database content, evaluate database content focusing on specific aspects, or to check compliance with modeling guidelines, for example.

In addition to report and semantic check scripts, you can create macros in Script Editor.

Depending on whether you define a macro rule, a semantic check rule, or write a report script, you must use the designated methods.

Script Editor launches automatically after you created a macro or semantic check using the Script Wizard. For the Script Editor to open after a report script was created you need to ensure that you enabled the Enter source text (code view) option on the Output page of the wizard.

All scripts approved for usage can be selected by the users using the corresponding wizards. The wizards launch automatically with the commands Evaluate > Start report, Evaluate > Start macro, etc.

Design view

The design view of Script Editor provides you with a comprehensive environment for creating reports. The graphical user interface enables you to create report scripts without any programming knowledge. In contrast to report scripts that you write in the code view of Script Editor, the design view enables you to collect and output information from databases.

The design view starts automatically if you enable the option Use report script template (design view) when creating a report script in the Script Wizard.

Reports that have been created in design view can be opened again and edited in this tool as long as the script code has not been edited in code view. In code view, you have access to methods that are not supported in design view.

On the Administration > Evaluations > Reports > Sample scripts tab the Report - Process manual report script is available to you as a sample.

Use case: How to work with report script templates