The Relational System - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 179

If we have not done so already, we should define the display field for the
author table, as explained in the Internal phpMyAdmin Relations section.

Foreign keys without linked-tables infrastructure
We see the Relation View link on the Structure page of a InnoDB or PBXT table,
even though the linked-tables infrastructure is not installed. This brings us to a
screen where we can define the foreign keys, in this case for the book table.

Note that, if we choose this, the display field for the linked table ( author here)
cannot be defined, as it belongs to phpMyAdmin's infrastructure. Thus, we would
lose the benefit of seeing the associated description of the foreign key.

Defining relations with the Designer
The Ajax-based Designer feature appeared in phpMyAdmin 2.10. It offers a
mouse-driven way of managing relations (both internal and foreign key-based),
and defining the display field for each table. It can also act as:

• A menu to access the structure of existing tables and to access the table

creation page.
A PDF schema manager, if we want a PDF schema encompassing all •

our tables.

On the Designer workspace, we can work on the relations for all tables on
the same panel. On the other hand, the Relation view shows the relations for
only a single table at a time.

We access this feature from the Database view by clicking the Designer menu tab.

If this menu tab does not appear, it's because we are yet to install
the linked-tables infrastructure as described previously in this
chapter—especially the designer_coords special table.