Writeup of some Cayenne experiences follows...
I've been using the Cayenne modeler for a couple of projects now and the
thing I miss the most is a detailed log/progress view where I can see
everything that was attempted and the g(l)ory details of all
exceptions/error messages.
- Connecting to a database gives very limited feedback when it fails.
E.g. I had a misconfigured MS SQL server and Cayenne gave me
a "something went wrong" error message, whereas the exception in
my JDBC hello world program contained much more information. When
translating error message to corrective action using Google, *any*
little piece of information, no matter how insignificant it may seem
at the time can be of vital importance :-)
- Reengineering an MS SQL database is an atomic user interface operation
where there are crucial configuration steps that must be in place on
the SQLServer end. E.g. I accidentally created a user without enough
access rights to access the tables I wanted to reverse engineer. This
didn't give me an error message, but rather nothing was reverse
engineered. Zero feedback can be frustrating when trying to figure out
whats going wrong.
- The Cayenne modeler reports ambiguously "Schema Generation Complete"
after I've clicked "Generate". It puts up this message even if it
has failed. E.g. when I try to generate
a schema which contains a field called "position" w/HSQLDB, it
causes HSQLDB to choke. The exceptions contain enough information to
clue me in on what's wrong, it is just the modeler which seems to
sensor this information.
- Weird error messages when switching between databases is business
as usual. The tricky part is when these error messages are not
propagated to the user. There is valuable information tucked away in
~/.cayenne/modeler.log
- Generated columns is supported by Cayenne if the underlying JDBC
driver + database adapter supports it. However, if the system
is somehow misconfigured, the "Generated" flag is silently ignored.
Some sort of feedback here(possibly via the log/progress view), would
be nice. (I'm currently investigating why this does not work for SQL
server + jDTS, Cayenne 1.2M5).
-- Øyvind Harboe http://www.zylin.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Fri Sep 02 2005 - 10:02:03 EDT