Forums

by Silver Springs ... >> Thu, 3 Feb 2000 21:38:45 GMT

Hi
What I really miss from my previous life is a facility to easily browse data in a tabular fashion. Being an OO database seems to have intrinsic restrictions on access to the actual instances of classes with the result that generally we all drill down to inspect individual instances in a somewhat cumbersome manner when testing etc.

Now that a generic Report Writer is on the horizon will this incorporate a facility to easily throw all (or a selection) of the contents of a class up in a new window on the screen (i.e. with coulmns being the attribute names and the rows being the instances) -- or will this be a separate NFS/requirement ??

I'm thinking from the development perspective because for end-users I'm sure the Report Writer will provide something like this. But for developers who want quick, easy access to data -- a data browser would be a great aid ???

Thoughts on a glorious still day .... (and will the Prada-America One race be postponed again) ...

SilverSprings ..........................
silversprings@easyliving.com

by Darrell Duniam >> Thu, 3 Feb 2000 23:22:37 GMT

The Cardinal Engineering Centre already has such a tool, which is included in our BaseSchema. This tool allows browsing and editing of Class instances.

One flaw with it however is:

The browser implements a "listCollection" style feature, yet uses the Class instances collection. Therefore the instances must be copied into an ObjectSet to allow an iterator to move both forwards and backwards (you can't iterate backwards through virtual collections). This is normally not too much of a problem, until you browse a class with many 1,000's of instances. Hopefully in its next incarnation the browser will be able to make use of MemberKeyDictionaries.

regards,
darrell.

by Chris Power >> Sun, 26 Nov 2000 19:54:50 GMT

See "ObjectBrowser is available" item dated 28 Jul 2000 later in this newsgroup for a freeware add-in for just this purpose, available from http://hyperdisc.unitec.ac.nz/staff/cpower.htm

Chris.