Using Design Templates to Refresh an Application Design

Using design templates when creating applications and to update existing applications enables designers to create a consistent design for multiple databases while minimizing development effort. The process of updating a database design from a design template can be manually triggered by the application designer, by an administrator running the Design task, or automatically if the Design task is scheduled to run overnight (for example, at 1:00 a.m.).

The Design task updates all databases that are set up to inherit their design from a design template. Database designs are refreshed only by design templates that exist on the same server as the database to be refreshed.

The Designer task can be run manually from the workspace or the administrator client, or by using a console command. To run the Design tasks on a server to update all the applicable databases on that server, type Load Design at the console command. To refresh the design of a single database, you can optionally provide arguments to specify the database, source server, destination server, or directory to refresh.