[teiid-designer-dev] VDB configuration

[John Verhaeg]

On Mar 23, 2010, at 3:48 PM, John Doyle wrote:

> On Mar 23, 2010, at 1:39 PM, John Doyle wrote:
> JDoyle- Sorry, if it weren't in a archive I would agree with you, but I'm not going to unzip it, edit and rezip, I would use eclipse. 

That just means you're using the wrong "quick" tool. 7-zip, for instance, allows you to edit in-line without having to unzip/rezip.  But on a more serious note, if you've taken the time to open the UI tool, the VDB editor, and the right tab, your whole argument about doing something more quickly than the UI falls apart.  You can certainly enter your quick change from II to &&, or more appropriate to this context, change a "supports update" flag from false to true, just as quickly using the UI text fields as you could manually editing the file in a different tab, and in fact should be even quicker than having to find the right place amongst the mess of XML tags and indentation in the file to change, and having to worry about getting quotes and escape characters entered properly.

> JDoyle- We're getting a little esoteric here but seriously, your don't recognize this as your personal preference?

Not at all, nor would I even say this is just a matter of "best practices".  I see this as right and wrong in designing UIs.  These concepts have been proven over and over again in lots of other tools, and any user of JBT/JBDS can quickly see why our current philosophy of just giving the user the ability to fill-in-the-blanks to our myriad text files leaves much to be desired.  It is so difficult to figure out how to get started, let alone how to make sure nothing gets screwed up, that it's not even funny.

> JDoyle-It's not a stop gap, it's another option.  Believe me, I'm not against good tooling.  I've been working with Hibernate Tools lately and have no time to learn what needs to be in a hibernate.config.xml or a reveng.xml, I use the UI to create them.  That said, if I need to edit the username and pw for the DB connection, I'm going to edit the xml in my eclipse project.  And as for the side effects, isn't this what the validation is for?  Why can't validation happen and the indexes be updated on notification that the file has changed?  These seem like technical challenges to me.

Agreed, that was my only point in this regard.  Not that it couldn't be done, but that there'd be lots of technical challenges to address.  The reference to it being a stop-gap solution was talking to a presumed lack of ease or ability when using the UI.

> JDoyle-I'm not arguing against the current tooling, I'm suggesting an addition.  And as far as text based configuration files go, they don't undermine the value of good UI,  here again Hibernate Tools are a good example.  JBoss's success has been fed by (and limited by) it's use of text based configuration.  Anyway, I acknowledge this suggestion as DOA.

I don't want this to be just my opinion, nor for my opinion alone to make this DOA.  I'd certainly like to here what community members would have to say on this issue.

Thanks,

JPAV



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