Advanced Description Editing

The Stemma UI provides a WYSIWYG editor for descriptions of tables and columns.

Using the editor

1. To begin editing, navigate to the table or column whose description you want to edit, and click on the pencil icon next to Description:

This opens up the text box for editing:

2. Add or change the description.
   • Descriptions can include links and images as well as text.
   • You can choose font styles as indicated by the buttons.
   • Use the pull-down menu to toggle the text format from the default (Normal) to common formatting elements such as headings, lists, quotes, and code blocks.
     • When you choose Code Block, you can choose the type of code from the secondary pull-down menu (the default is JavaScript).
   • You can add hyperlinks: enter and highlight the text to display, then click the 🔗button and enter the URL (and edit it if necessary) in the text box next the button.
   • You can also add links to other tables.
   • The editor also supports Markdown syntax, as well as any shortcuts your system supports (such as ⌘-b for bold on a Mac)
3. When you are finished, click Update to save your changes.

Linking to other tables from the description

This is useful, for example, if you want to give other users more information about the relationship between the tables.

To link to another table from the description, do the following:

1. In the Stemma UI, navigate to the table whose description you want to edit.
2. Click on the pencil icon next to Description.

3. Enter the new desription providing the related table’s<schema_name>.<table_name> anywhere in the text.

4. Click Update to save your changes.

The new description will contain the link to the related table:

Sharing column descriptions

You can share a column description with all columns of the same name across the catalog. To do this:

1. In the Stemma UI, navigate to the table whose column description you want to share.
2. To add or modify a description, click on the down-arrow to the left of the entry for the column:

3. Hover over the word Description and click on the pen that appears:

4. Add or update the description and click on Update. Stemma automatically discovers all columns with the same name, and the description propagates to all linked columns. To see which columns are linked, and add and remove links, click on the three dots to the right of the column entry:

Click on the Edit linked columns pop-up. In the dialog window, you can:search for and add columns to link, and remove existing links.

When you have finished, click Done.