The goal of the wizard is to create a “field” on the current entity (that’s what it is trying to say in its name). That means it needs an entity to which the field would be added.
Let’s say you have an AddressBook
entity and you want add a Category
field, so the user could specify each contact’s category. As the category should be a drop-down from which the user would pick an item, we need all the lookup stuff.
You right-click on the AddressBook
entity and select Create Lookup Field (incl. entity)…
You name it Category
.
These are the manual steps the wizard will save you:
- It first creates the
Category
entity with fieldsId
,Name
and some other standard fields - Then it creates a lookup for the
Category
entity - It will script the
Category
table into the Deployment model - Optionally it will seed data for the lookup table (e.g. example categories)
- Then it creates a field that references that lookup on the current entity (e.g.
AddressBook.refCategoryId
- Then it scripts the newly created field and database constraint into the deployment model
Without specifying a base entity you would just be creating a plain entity. And that’s what you can do already with New > Data Entity.