In this chapter, we will give you a "bird's eye" overview of Alventis.

Alventis is an information management application. It has been designed to:

When generalized to this extent, Alventis appears - at least at first sight - to be no different from many other Personal Information Managers (PIMs) or Database Management Systems (DBMSs). There are quite a few important differences though.

In other words, Alventis is a database application that can simultaneously support a multitude of data formats, while at the same time giving you as unified a view as possible of all your multi-faceted information.

This is all very nice and general, but a little abstract and theoretical, so let's examine what Alventis can do using an example. While at it, we will try to gradually introduce some useful terms we will be using in the rest of the text.

Let's say we want to keep track of things. "Things" come in a variety of "shapes and sizes" though. We may, for instance, want to put together a list of our friends, their phone numbers, addresses, birthdays, and so on. We may want to make a list of our favorite recipes, what part of the world they are from, what ingredients go into them, and how long their well-blended mix should stay in the microwave. Finally, we would likely want to be able to just jot things down – things that may not fall into any particular category, and may not have any discernable format. Just notes.

Since all of these kinds of information are sufficiently different from one another, it makes sense to keep them separate. We will therefore put each kind in its own data table. Let's call these tables Contacts, Recipes, and Notes. Each of these tables will have some pieces of information in common. It may make sense, for example, to record the date when we recorded a particular Note or Recipe. Or the date we last modified it. Because of this, all tables in Alventis have several standard "System" fields, e.g., Creation Date, Last Modification Date, Subject, Category. Beyond these items, things start to diverge though. Our Contacts table probably needs such fields as: First Name, Last Name, Birthday, Telephone, E-mail, and so on. The Recipes table is likely to record things like: Ingredients, Preparation Procedure, Part of the World. Finally, the Notes table may only need a single item: the Note itself. Such diversity is likely to be the rule for just about any type of information (and table) you can think of. Which is why Alventis can handle tables with any number of fields of almost any kind you may wish for – in addition to the above-mentioned system fields. It is this approach that makes it possible to treat all types of data mostly the same way, while at the same time fully preserving their true "identity", format, etc. Basically: a Contact entry is a record, and a Note is a record, so many operations can regard them as "similar enough". Search, for instance.

Search in Alventis works across all available data formats. Imagine you have a nice database of hundreds of Contacts, dozens of Recipes, lots of Notes, and thousands of records in a bunch of other formats/tables. Imagine now that you are looking for your friend Richard's phone number. Okay, so it's not very likely that you jotted it down somewhere in the middle of a Royale with Cheese Recipe. However, it may be lurking in either the Contacts or the Notes table. Or perhaps some other unforeseen place. This is not a problem with Alventis. Select the tables you want to search in, type your search – and you get a list of all records that contain the name Richard anywhere in them. Doesn't matter which table or which field of that table: Alventis will almost instantaneously locate the requested information and present to you a list of all relevant records. This list gives you a unified view of the search results, even though some records may be coming from the Contacts table, and others may belong to Notes. You can examine each found record in detail by opening it.

Each table in Alventis will usually have at least one form associated with it. We shall refer to such forms as InfoViews. Each InfoView is tailored to display a record from a particular table, so each can have its own presentation format and layout. The Contacts table will likely have an InfoView with quite a few Text Boxes. The Notes table on the other hand may get by with just one large Memo box. Whatever makes sense. Generally speaking, an InfoView is the window through which you view the table it corresponds to. It is here that you can view and navigate records, edit existing, and create new ones. For those of you who have some database or data-processing background, InfoViews are pretty much what some applications refer to as "data-entry forms" or similar.

You can do quite a few other things with records in Alventis. You can perform queries on data tables using the SQL language. You can create Reports and save them or print them (if you still insist on working with paper). You can calculate certain useful things for records presented in grids, such as totals and averages. But at the base of it all lies a deceptively simple idea.

Work with any number of different tables at the same time. Perform searches on them as if they were one. Scroll through search results as if they were coming from the same table. View and edit individual records of all tables in their respective InfoViews.

And this would be the end of our quick presentation – if it weren't for...

Alventis Designer. Its concept is so simple, we'll just say it. It gives you the ability to:

Alventis does come with a number of tables and InfoViews that may be quite useful "out of the box". However, there is nothing special or "built-in" about these items. They have simply been created using Designer – the same exact way you could do it yourself. We just wanted to show you what Alventis can do while giving you something useful at the same time.

The bottom line is: whatever Tables, InfoViews, Queries, and Reports you see in Alventis, you can create all of this stuff yourself – either from scratch or by modifying the existing ones to your liking. All this is accomplished with absolutely no programming or scripting.

In order to give you a general idea of what Alventis is all about, we have omitted many important details. You will find them in the remainder of this manual.