Dear all,
Firstly may I apologise to Mark. The work I outline in this message was
done before I realised you had already made the first version of the
DataWidget ocx control. I had totally missed it.
http://www.fosterfinch.co.uk/pgadmin
The site has a link to a screen grab of my first table ocx control design.
it has absolutely no code in it yet.
Things to note, and for discussion
- Tables will be able to be themed (blue, red, white, yellow), wher the
background colours all change to that theme, if the user wishes to, in
order to spot tables quicker in the designer
- Bold fieldnames are Primary Keys
- italic fieldnames have some form on constraint other than FK on them
- underlined fields are FKs
- tick boxes on left do what MS SQL designer does, selects fields for display
- White boxes at end of fieldname line tell you the column type in
abbreviated form (i8 - Int8, Vc - Varchar etc.)
- The idea will bwe that when the user hovers over one of these a pop up
tells you additional info like Varchar length, or check/FK constraint details
Thoughts:
- Mark, I see you have fleshed out more on the code side of your
datawidgets, I will use these methods/props etc where feasible. I feel that
my design of the datatable ocx is a bit more clean and less fussy. As the
designer is going to be pressured for screen space at the top for the
tables we are going to need to keep the tables small.
- I know the wish list for pgAdmin contains the idea of a project file in
the future. This is going to be a key requirement, esp where query
designing is concerned as the user will position tables and colour them
etc. and will want this to be retrieved. Surely one of the best places to
keep the project file is actually in a table in database itself? In the
meantime, what will we do about storing the non SQL aspects of a view
design for retrieval later on - simply save them to a .pvd (PgAdmin View
Design) file on the local drive of the user?
Hope this input helps get ideas rolling.
Tim.