Visual Specification of Complex Database Actions

The paper presents an approach to specify in an integrated way by visual , diagrammatic languages the structural and behavioural aspects of database applications. Hereby, well-known extended Entity-Relationship diagrams are employed to specify the structural aspects. The behavioural aspects of a database application are speciied by using ViAL (Visual Action Language). ViAL speciications are a special kind of data (or better object) ow diagrams, where so-called elementary actions are used as basic building blocks. These elementary actions are automatically derived from a given EER diagram. They guarantee that after nishing their execution all inherent integrity constraints are fulllled. The paper explains the features of the language ViAL and gives some illustrating examples.