by Carsten Sørensen » Fri Feb 15, 2008 5:52 pm
Hi Jean-Luc,
The Joinbuilder is restricted to 7 (not 5) tables. When you use the 5th column 2 additional columns will be available.
In theory no real reason for the limitation - it was originally limited not to overwhelm the user with too many options.
If you need more than 7 objects joined - then you need to use a Dynamic AI SQL View. You can however build the initial join using the joinbuilder and copy the SQL accross to the Dynamic AI SQL View. You can open a joinbuild in one browser tab and a Dynamic AI SQL View in another and copy / paste SQL around like you need.
We might extend the possibility to add more objects to the joinbuilder - however in practice we would expect that you probably would like SUB SQL restrictions (like putting specific WHERE clauses to underlying joined objects) or other more sophisticated SQL that anyway would require the access to FREE SQL.
The disadvantage of the SQL View is however, that it will not be as intelligent as the joinbuilder in terms of only joining relevante tables... However when you join many objects you usually would require more control anyway. (Server edition Dynamic AI does offer some additional rather cool features in that respect (partitioning, free parameters, redirected filters etc.)).