Re: [gnome-db] [mergeant] Status ?

["Vivien" <malerba gnome-db org>]

> Vivien wrote:
>>>	Hi all,
>>>I'm playing with mergeant.
>>>[...]
>>
>> Mergeant is in the process of a major rewrite at the moment to:
>
> Next number will be 1.0.0 :-)

There is still quite a lot of work before 1.0.0!

>
>> - have a better framework for future features
>
> where can i read about it ?

There is at the moment only the libmergeant's doc (generated using
gtk-doc). Basically libmergeant is a memory structure representing the
data dictionnary of a DBMS connection. The dictionnary (held within on
single MgConf object) contains information about:
-> the server (possible data types, functions and aggregates)
-> the database structure (the tables and views and their fields)
-> most the database's constraints (primary keys, foreign keys, missing
are the check constraints)
-> user defined queries (DML queries of any type, including sub-queries)

When first used on a data-source, libmergeant creates its dictionnary from
the DBMS, and then can store it to an XML file (which can be used in
subsequent connections to that data-source).

Libmergeant also has specific widgets which greatly reduces the code
required to make forms and tabular views of data, in the same way as
GnomeDbForm and GnomeDbGrid except that all the data modification queries
are generated automatically (it does not replace those two widgets in any
way because to use them the data dictionnary is required, which is not the
case for those widgets).

More widgets exist and are planned to graphically represent the database
structure, etc.



>
>> libmergeant (which I'm working on at the moment)
>
> is fresh version in the cvs.gnome repository ?

No, but I'll commit the version I've been working on for some time (I did
not use gnome's CVS because it was not cnvenient and because I've been the
only developer on libmergeant so far).

cvs.gnome contains a libmergeant module which Rodrigo will remove and
which must not be used.

>
>>
>> Mergeant 0.50.0 is just the start of the integration of the new library
>
> libmergeant ?

Yes.

>
>> and has no interesting feature at the moment.
>>
>
> How can i start to change it ?

-> Do a checkout of the libmergeant module _only_ to build the doc (which
is not yet present in the mergeant module).
-> Do a checkout of the mergeant module and start working in the frontend/
dir (not src/ since it is for the old version).

It has been decided that when launched without any argument, mergeant will
propose a data-source selection and when the user has selected one,
mergeant tries to load the corresponding XML dictionnary, or builds a
dictionnary from the DBMS. At the moment there is no function in
libmergeant to get the dictionnary's XML file corresponding to a
data-source (I will add it soon), so you need to make it create a
dictionnary each time the user selects a data-source (use the
extra/mg-db-browser.c file as an example).

Mergeant should also be run with either the name of a data source or the
name of a XML dictionnary to load.

You can use the MgSelector object to provide a treeview like display of
some objects of the dictionnary (tables, etc).

> Will 'major' new mergeant include glade prj ?

I'd like to make libmergeant's widgets available to Glade, but no work has
been done so far.


If you need some info, please ask.

Vivien