Existing Pipelines

This section describes how to work with database schemas without access to the original code that generated the schema. These situations often arise when the database is created by another user who has not shared the generating code yet or when the database schema is created from a programming language other than Matlab.

Creating a virtual class

DataJoint MATLAB creates a TableAccessor property in each schema object. The TableAccessor property, a virtual class generator, is available as schema.v, and allows listing and querying of the tables defined on the server without needing to create the MATLAB table definitions locally. For example, creating a scratch experiment schema package and querying an existing my_experiment.Session table on the server can be done as follows:

dj.createSchema('experiment', '/scratch', 'my_experiment')
addpath('/scratch')
experiment_schema = experiment.getSchema();
experiment_schema.v.Session() & 'session_id=1234';

Note

You can view the available tables in a schema by using tab completion on the schema.v property.

To visualize an unfamiliar schema, see commands for generating diagrams.