Re: [Pride-users] Questions from a new user

[<jle...@gm...>]

Hi Anders
I'm just back from holiday, so excuse the delay of my answers to some of 
your questions. I put my comments in between.

Thanks for you details feedback and suggestions in general.

Cheers,
Jan


> What is required to get support for Sybase ASA? What exactly does it 
> mean that you support a specific database? I managed to get things 
> working (what I've seen so far) by setting dbtype to SQLSERVER. 
> (Sybase ASA has been meade largely compatible with ASE, and MS SQL 
> Server is based on an early version of ASE.) 

Unfortunately, there are some things in SQL which have never been 
perfectly standardized but are left to the database vendor to some 
degree. Probably the best-known example for that is the format for date 
values in SQL insert and update statements. PriDE must therefore be 
configured to "speak the vendor-specific" slang of SQL in some cases. 
There are actually not too many different slangs around, so specifiying 
one of the officially supported ones might very well work for others 
too, just as you experienced with your Sybases database.
If you want to be sure that everything is working well, you should 
execute PriDE's JUnit test suite on your database.

> One thing that could be improved in the documentation is how to set up 
> the database connection. Explicitly stating which properties to set 
> would help. I have it working so obviously it could be deduced from 
> reading the docs and/or the code, but it can be made easier.

Good idea. I just checked the documentation and there is actually no 
explicite list of available configuration parameters. I'll improve the 
documentation accordingly.

> Regarding the convenience classes DatabaseAdapter, DatabaseRecord, 
> ObjectAdapter, MappedObject and ValueObjectAdapter as well as the 
> eclipse plugin:
> 1) You're giving us too much convenience. ;-)

That's a matter of history ;-)

> 2) Most methods in DatabaseAdapter are declared "protected static". 
> Isn't that an odd combination? Why not make them "public static" and 
> reference them statically. 

Well, if you walk along the derivation hirarchy it makes a lot of sense 
to me. DatabaseAdapter is supposed to be used as a base class only and 
therefore has only protected methods. The two default derivations 
ObjecteAdapter and DatabaseRecord both use these functions. Which 
oddness do you see in there?

> 3) The eclipse plugin should generate classes with two "public static 
> final" attributes called DESCRIPTOR and KEY_FIELDS. 

Why? Currently these members are generated *protected* because they are 
supposed to be used only internally or by derived adapters. This seems 
reasonable to me.

> In the Database class I'm missing a method:
> fetchRecord(String[] dbkeyfields, Object obj, RecordDescriptor red)
>
> Having it would make that class more complete/consistent. 

Yes, could be added, of course? On the other hand, the access methods of 
that class are very seldomly used. Do you have a particular access 
problem in mind when asking for this function?