Re: Modeler thoughts ...

From: Andrus Adamchik (andru..bjectstyle.org)
Date: Fri Aug 21 2009 - 03:00:58 EDT

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    Hi Michael,

    thanks for this list. Always good to see how the end users view things
    vs. your own assumptions about how it should work.

    On Aug 20, 2009, at 10:56 PM, Michael Gentry wrote:
    > [1] E/H - Found creating a new model confusing.

    Could be a valid concern especially for people who have to unlearn
    stuff. The existing tutorial should help, but of course it is not
    built in the Modeler. I recommend the new users to spend half an hour
    on the tutorial. This usually answers all these questions.

    > [2] E - Wanted the OS X concept of a wrapper/bundle for the model
    > files. Essentially, he wanted to be able to name his model file
    > (something other than cayenne.xml), but as we talked more he wanted a
    > bundle that he can name ("MyProject" -> MyProject.cayenne directory)
    > and then the cayenne.xml, etc files would be under there.

    Somewhat related to that, there's a plan to allow multiple mappings
    from unrelated projects to get merged in runtime, so better modularity
    can be achieved. As for placing mappings in a folder, we've had this
    discussion before. I don't see much point to it.

    > [3] H - One guy used Cayenne quite a bit, but eventually ditched the
    > modeler and edited the XML by hand. "It's not intuitive. I was
    > confused. I remember having so many problems setting up the correct
    > path so when files were generated they had the right path and package
    > names." I'm not sure which version of the modeler he was using, but
    > probably 2.x.

    This was a long standing bug. It is fixed in 3.0M6. But if his only
    problem was class generation, I don't understand why he ditched the
    Modeler? I use the Modeler for all work *except* class generation, for
    which I'd use Ant/Maven.

    > [4] M/E/H - Allow multiple projects to be open at the same time. The
    > EOF guy considered this a bug.

    +1.

    > [5] H - More useful validation. "When it is validating the mapping
    > file, I dont find its output useful at all. Since the mapping works
    > despite the warnings raised in the modeler, I question the value of
    > those warnings." I think he was probably using 2.x then.

    Not sure what he means. Some examples would be helpful. Warnings are
    very useful to me at least. All of them are important.

    > [8] E - "I can't figure out how to flatten a relationship." I had to
    > fess up and tell him that I didn't know, either.

    Cayenne is different from EOF in having separate DB and object layers
    of metadata, so naturally the process will be different. Use inspector
    button on the ObjRelationship panel to set a db path (current trunk
    also includes support for attribute flattenning via a similar UI).

    > [10] M - If you select an ObjEntity and look at the attributes, then
    > resize a column (say, Java Type) so you can read everything in the
    > column, then select something else, then come back to that same
    > ObjEntity, the column doesn't retain the size you had set. I suspect
    > this applies to more than just the attributes tab (too lazy to go try
    > the others right now).

    +1. There's a Jira being implemented right now that would memorize the
    column width for all tables.

    Andrus



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