The Relational System
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Defining Relations with the Designer
The Ajax-based Designer feature appeared in phpMyAdmin 2.10. It offers a
mouse-driven way of managing relations??”both internal and InnoDB-based??”and
of defining the display field for each table. It can also act as:
A menu to access the structure of existing tables and to access the table
creation page.
A PDF schema manager, if we want a PDF schema encompassing all
our tables.
On the Designer workspace, we can work on the relations for all tables on the same
panel, whereas the Relation view shows the relations for a single table at a time.
We access this feature from the Database view by clicking the Designer menu tab.
If this menu tab does not appear, it's because we have yet to install the
linked-tables infrastructure as described previously in this chapter,
especially the designer_coords special table.
Interface Overview
The Designer page contains a main workspace where the tables can be seen. This
workspace grows and shrinks dynamically, depending on the position of our tables.
A top menu contains icons whose description is revealed by hovering on them. Here
is a summary of the goal for the top menu's icons:
Show/Hide left menu: For left menu presence.
Save position: Saves the current state of the workspace to the infrastructure.
Create table: Quits the designer and enters a dialog to create a table.
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