| [dali-dev] Connecting to the database |
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One of the enhancements we wanted to make for the M3 milestone involves
prompting to connect to the database at certain points, as we are
currently dependent on live database information to provide all of our
functionality. I wanted to post some thoughts on this to see if anyone
else had additional thoughts on this functionality. Also, bugzilla is
currently down, so I couldn't enter this into an ER. Here are some thoughts: - Prompting should be done at specific points in time where a user has requested to do something that requires a database connection. This would include things like generating entities from tables, and generating tables from entities. - For situations where you are in a dialog and being connected is not required, but would be helpful, it would be nice to have a way to connect from that dialog (Button or a Link). This would apply to the Add Java Persistence wizard and Java Persistence properties page. - This leaves the issue of not getting resolution problems and DB selections in the UI when disconnected. For this case, it has been suggested that some sort of visual indicator could be used. It has also been suggested that there could be a "Not connected" (warning level) problem that stays around until you connect. Basically all of this is of the intent to help the user with reconnecting to the DB after starting a new session. Note: The Database Explorer already has a connect/disconnect button in their ExplorerView, so we don't want to duplicate this functionality. Whatever we do, we want to steer clear of annoying the user. Another thing to consider is that we will eventually support off-line database functionality, which would mean that working off-line would become a much more common use case. Let me know if you have any thoughts on how we could help the user out for the 3rd case (problems and UI). Perhaps we should look at adding off-line schema support first and then determine what would be sufficient for the 3rd case? -Neil Neil Hauge TopLink Tools Oracle Corporation neil.hauge@xxxxxxxxxx |