A text based Project Definition File (

.sdf

) is used to specify options and parameters which define your Project, clusterings, jobs, logical files, database files and views.

The Project Definition File has the following syntax:

Quoted strings can be continued onto the next line by coding two adjacent string tokens. For example, the

COMMENT=

keyword is another way of defining a comment inside the definition files. If a

COMMENT

field is very long, it could be specified like this:

COMMENT="This is a very long comment that"
" continues on the next line."

Some definitions will require the specification of a character such as a filler character. It will be denoted as

<char>

in the following text. The Definition Language permits a

<char>

to be specified in a number of ways:

Numeric data in the

Project Definition File

may be suffixed by an optional modifier to help specify large numbers:

The Project Definition File is created using a text editor. Although it is recommended that you begin with one of the example Project definition files supplied in the

dce/tests

subdirectory on the DCE Client. The Project Definition File is then loaded into the DCE Rulebase during the

Project

New step

.

After the initial load, the Project Definition File is maintained using the Project Editor tool in the DCE Console. Refer to the

Editing a Project

section for more details.