Tuesday, February 01, 2005

 

Development 2/1

I added a new feature to Edit that may provide some additional benefit to users. A new tab was added to the options dialog that allows the user to specify aliases for objects, specifically tables and views. These aliases will be used in the editor whenever the user tries to bring up a column list for an alias that has not been defined yet.

For example, if the alias cust is defined for the table customers, then when typing the select clause, the user can use the cust alias and still get column info before defining the from clause so that the alias can provide column information before the user has defined it so that the select clause can provide Intellisense without forcing the user to define the from clause first. The aliases can be defined from very specific (assigned to server/database) to very general (any server/any database). When Intellisense has an alias that it cannot resolve in the current context, it will look in the aliases definitions from the most specific to the least specific for a matching object and then attempt to show Intellisense columns for that alias.

We are also "thinking" about providing an optional switch that would let the user have the table/view Intellisense automatically insert the defined alias when the user picks a table/view from the list. The system would do a reverse alias lookup and find the object and then insert the alias for the user. This would help a user keep tables aliased in the same way once defined.
Comments: Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?