SchemaSpy

Hi John,

What a wonderful tool you've created here. I looked over a lot of paid and free tools before finding SchemaSpy, and it easily blows the socks off of all of them.

Anyhoo, this isn't a forum for comments - sorry about that. I'm creating a "data dictionary" (that term seems to vary in meaning - in this case, we can assume I mean "a SchemaSpy representation of my database with all the 'Comments' fields filled in") for a database with just enough tables to make it work trying to make the commenting process a bit smoother (75 tables, 45 views).

My idea is to make the 'Comments' fields in the table and field lists editable, such that you can click a (HTML) table cell to add/edit an XML file for the given schema. It seems to me like this would entail the following steps:

- edit the java code that creates the desired <td></td> section: likely insert some kind of link to 'add/edit comment'
- write the javascript to show/hide the text input for the comment, and save the comment to the XML file (should be easy with jquery and a simple back-end script)
- either send a command to the back-end to re-generate the whole schema, or just have the above step also write the comment to the currently-generated HTML file

I just realized while writing this, of course, that this involves adding server side processing to your system, which is beyond a trivial change to your installation/usage methods. So, while it may not make it into the main stream of your project, I might still give this a shot myself and see how it goes. While I am a software developer (python, C, perl, php are my current strengths/favourites), I've not much experience with java, so I may not get anywhere in the time I've got to work on it, and I may end up getting something working.

Any comments or suggestions would be great!

Aaron