Ad-hoc data manipulation possible?

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by Jason from NZ >> Mon, 19 May 2008 21:31:53 GMT

A friend is evaluating a product built on Jade and wonders whether it is possible to perform ad-hoc data updates via some sort of console.

That is to say: With a "regular" database system one typically has a tool (e.g. SQL Server Management Studio, Query Analyser, ...) for performing ad-hoc data queries and/or executing data modification queries - UPDATE, INSERT, DELETE, etc.

What would be the equivalent in the world of Jade?

I realise that Jade is an OO database system where one would typically interact with the data in terms of objects.

Let's say you were administering someone's Jade-based system and the customer asked you to remove the reformat the email address property of every Customer in their database in bulk. Without actually coding up a thin client application to do it, is there a way to achieve that - ad-hoc?

Thanks for your attention.

Jason

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by Allistar >> Mon, 19 May 2008 22:53:48 GMT

A client of mine has addressed this issue by having a secret form (secret as in they don't tell users that it's there, or how to get to it) which requires a secure password to access (secure as in the password is hard to crack). That form has a Jade editor control in it and it allows us to enter in Jade code to do whatever we like. There is a "run" button, which runs the code. Jade makes this very difficult to achieve, but I do suggest caution for obvious reasons.

You could deploy a schema to the site that has an app and upon running that app it shows such a form (asking for a password first, of course). It would be possible to do this in such a way as to be able to "drop" it into any Jade system.
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A.

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by Murray Symon >> Tue, 20 May 2008 6:48:15 GMT

If you have a Jade development capability:
(1) JadeScript
(2) workspace code (File -> New)

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by Torrie Moore >> Thu, 22 May 2008 21:24:02 GMT

The Jade licence allows you to include a development licence on a production server for diagnosis use. (see the Diagnostic Development Capability section in the Jade Licence document http://www.jadeworld.com/downloads/jade ... ensing.pdf) We request this feature for all our client sites. It allows you to use the Jade Development environment to run Jade Scripts or workspaces against the systems data

Deployed systems also include a Jade Inspector application which allows you to view your data without the Jade development environment.

When updates are needed, we normally code this as a script and then deploy the script to the system before executing it through a non-gui application which we've built. This application takes the script name on the command line. While we could run a workspace etc, we prefer to script the entire upgrade process so we can run it on a test environment and then re run it on a production system, knowing that all the steps will be done in exactly the same way.

Torrie