Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Development 2/16
Well, had a busy day on the forums today answering user suggestions, issues, questions. I did get a lot of items that should make it in v2.16 which will probably be available 2nd week or so of March.
While I am getting things in order to start on SCC integration next week, I have been working on adding a new Intellisense like feature that I'm calling Value Lists. How this will work is that it will take actual data based off of items provided automatically by Edit or customized by the user and will show data values in an intellisense type method to the user.
As an example, take the Customers table in Northwind. If the user were to type:
select * from customers where customerid =
At the point where the user types the "=", a list would appear will all of the items from the customer table such that it would show something like:
ALFKI - Alfred...
BEANC - ...
etc.
The user could then pick a value from the list or press the ESC key to cancel out of the list like normal.
How this would work would be that it would look at the column prior to the "=" and see that it is CustomerID, it would then look up CustomerID in a list similar to how it works for quick info and if the column was found (along with table/database/server/owner/schema matches) then it would display data from that table. This would also work if the user did the following query:
select * from orders where customerid =
Again, here the user would be shown a list of users for them to pick and insert into the script. The list itself could be turned on/off and the columns for which data values or displayed could be customized as well. This feature should really help when dealing with foreign keys or codes where you try to filter by some code or key that is not obvious or not well know. For example, you may not have a list for a Sex column, but a State column might have:
AK - Alaska
AL - Alabama
AR - Arkansas
AZ - Arizona
...
Another feature we are looking at for v2.16 is the ability to create project workspaces which can contain several types of items such as script files on disk as well as schema objects. The project would provide an easy way to deal with scripts and schema objects so that you could group items into a project metaphor and work on them that way. The project workspace could also have interchangeable connections such that you will be able to pick the connection for the workspace and have that connection applied to all queries. We are hoping that this will make it easier to manage projects that involve many script files but that also use schema objects.
For displaying the project workspace, I am thinking about displaying an additional schema tab with the workspace objects in place of the current server/database/object items. The workspace would then work similar to the current schema in that it would let users group things into folders, right click to open, etc. The list of items we want for project workspaces may be more exhaustive than what we can get into v2.16 but we hope to have an initial stab at it in the v2.16 release.
While I am getting things in order to start on SCC integration next week, I have been working on adding a new Intellisense like feature that I'm calling Value Lists. How this will work is that it will take actual data based off of items provided automatically by Edit or customized by the user and will show data values in an intellisense type method to the user.
As an example, take the Customers table in Northwind. If the user were to type:
select * from customers where customerid =
At the point where the user types the "=", a list would appear will all of the items from the customer table such that it would show something like:
ALFKI - Alfred...
BEANC - ...
etc.
The user could then pick a value from the list or press the ESC key to cancel out of the list like normal.
How this would work would be that it would look at the column prior to the "=" and see that it is CustomerID, it would then look up CustomerID in a list similar to how it works for quick info and if the column was found (along with table/database/server/owner/schema matches) then it would display data from that table. This would also work if the user did the following query:
select * from orders where customerid =
Again, here the user would be shown a list of users for them to pick and insert into the script. The list itself could be turned on/off and the columns for which data values or displayed could be customized as well. This feature should really help when dealing with foreign keys or codes where you try to filter by some code or key that is not obvious or not well know. For example, you may not have a list for a Sex column, but a State column might have:
AK - Alaska
AL - Alabama
AR - Arkansas
AZ - Arizona
...
Another feature we are looking at for v2.16 is the ability to create project workspaces which can contain several types of items such as script files on disk as well as schema objects. The project would provide an easy way to deal with scripts and schema objects so that you could group items into a project metaphor and work on them that way. The project workspace could also have interchangeable connections such that you will be able to pick the connection for the workspace and have that connection applied to all queries. We are hoping that this will make it easier to manage projects that involve many script files but that also use schema objects.
For displaying the project workspace, I am thinking about displaying an additional schema tab with the workspace objects in place of the current server/database/object items. The workspace would then work similar to the current schema in that it would let users group things into folders, right click to open, etc. The list of items we want for project workspaces may be more exhaustive than what we can get into v2.16 but we hope to have an initial stab at it in the v2.16 release.
