You can change how you view topics in the Content frame. There are three ways to view topics, as shown in Figure 7, Structure (1), Detail (2), and Icon (3) Topic Views:
Structure view—Displays a topic as a simple list of component data items. This is the default setting.
Structure view enables you to view and select individual data items to include in a query. This is the easiest view to use if you are familiar with the information that a data model, topics, and topic items represent.
Detail View—Presents a topic in actual database view with a sample of the underlying data. When you change to Detail view, a small query is executed and a selection of data is loaded from the database server. The topic is displayed as a database table with each topic item displayed as a database column field.
Detail view is useful when you are unfamiliar with a topic. You can browse the first few rows of data to see exactly what is available before adding a topic item to the query.
Icon View—Deactivates a topic and reduces it to an icon in the Content frame. When a topic is displayed in Icon View, associated items are removed from the Request and Limit lines. The topic is not recognized as being joined to other topics, and is temporarily removed from the data model and the SQL statement.
If no items from a topic are needed for a particular query and the topic does not link together other topics which are in use, reduce the topic temporarily to Icon view to make large queries run faster and to consume fewer database resources.
To change a topic view: