As we have explained, a foreign key is implied in an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) through the Connectivity of a relationship and therefore, does not explicitly exist in an entity. However, when Database Design Studio (DDS) generates the logical model from the conceptual model, the foreign keys are created and inserted into the respective objects in the model. This sometime results in foreign key columns with names that are inaccurate or inappropriate.
As foreign keys only exist in the logical model, the place to edit the foreign key names is in the Data Structure Diagram (DSD) object properties grid.
Consider the following example. In this case we have an Employee being supervised by another Employee. Our simplistic model assumes that an Employee can be supervised by at most one other Employee:
Under this scenario, the relationship implies that the primary key of the Employee entity will also be a foreign key of the same entity. When DDS generates the DSD, you will find that the Employee primary key has been included as a foreign key with the same name as the primary key column, prefixed with an 'r' to imply it was generated through a recursive relationship:
Clearly, this is not very descriptive, and therefore we would like to rename the column rEmpID to SupervisedBy. This is done in the DSD column properties of the Employee table:
DDS will preserve the new name of the foreign key throughout future model modifications.
See also: Foreign Keys, Foreign Primary Keys and Ordering Rows in Grids