You can hide or make invisible properties by using USRPROPS.TXT.

The question often arises as to what happens when you hide a property for which information has already been entered into the encyclopedia. For example, assume that you have been adding data elements to the encyclopedia, and have supplied the responsible business areas for each element in the Business Unit property. But half way through the project, it has been decided that Business Unit is no longer needed. All you have to do is change the property Business Unit to an invisible, or hidden, property, through a modification in USRPROPS.TXT; it no longer appears in the data element definition dialog.

When you were entering Business Unit values, they were added to the encyclopedia. The modification to the encyclopedia's metamodel (above) makes the Business Unit property disappear from the data element definition dialog, but it does not delete previous entries of Business Unit information. If you remove the code above from USRPROPS.TXT, the Business Unit property will appear again in the data element definition dialog, and the values previously entered will reappear in their respective data element.

The question arises: how can you remove excess unneeded property information? It can be done by careful use of the Export Definitions and Import Definitions commands under the Dictionary menu.

Performing this task is optional. It is only necessary if you want to regain the memory space used by the excess values.