Hi Michael,
thanks for this list. Always good to see how the end users view things
vs. your own assumptions about how it should work.
On Aug 20, 2009, at 10:56 PM, Michael Gentry wrote:
[1] E/H - Found creating a new model confusing.
Could be a valid concern especially for people who have to unlearn
stuff. The existing tutorial should help, but of course it is not
built in the Modeler. I recommend the new users to spend half an hour
on the tutorial. This usually answers all these questions.
[2] E - Wanted the OS X concept of a wrapper/bundle for the model
files. Essentially, he wanted to be able to name his model file
(something other than cayenne.xml), but as we talked more he wanted a
bundle that he can name ("MyProject" -> MyProject.cayenne directory)
and then the cayenne.xml, etc files would be under there.
Somewhat related to that, there's a plan to allow multiple mappings
from unrelated projects to get merged in runtime, so better modularity
can be achieved. As for placing mappings in a folder, we've had this
discussion before. I don't see much point to it.
[3] H - One guy used Cayenne quite a bit, but eventually ditched the
modeler and edited the XML by hand. "It's not intuitive. I was
confused. I remember having so many problems setting up the correct
path so when files were generated they had the right path and package
names." I'm not sure which version of the modeler he was using, but
probably 2.x.
This was a long standing bug. It is fixed in 3.0M6. But if his only
problem was class generation, I don't understand why he ditched the
Modeler? I use the Modeler for all work *except* class generation, for
which I'd use Ant/Maven.
[4] M/E/H - Allow multiple projects to be open at the same time. The
EOF guy considered this a bug.
+1.
[5] H - More useful validation. "When it is validating the mapping
file, I dont find its output useful at all. Since the mapping works
despite the warnings raised in the modeler, I question the value of
those warnings." I think he was probably using 2.x then.
Not sure what he means. Some examples would be helpful. Warnings are
very useful to me at least. All of them are important.
[8] E - "I can't figure out how to flatten a relationship." I had to
fess up and tell him that I didn't know, either.
Cayenne is different from EOF in having separate DB and object layers
of metadata, so naturally the process will be different. Use inspector
button on the ObjRelationship panel to set a db path (current trunk
also includes support for attribute flattenning via a similar UI).
[10] M - If you select an ObjEntity and look at the attributes, then
resize a column (say, Java Type) so you can read everything in the
column, then select something else, then come back to that same
ObjEntity, the column doesn't retain the size you had set. I suspect
this applies to more than just the attributes tab (too lazy to go try
the others right now).
+1. There's a Jira being implemented right now that would memorize the
column width for all tables.
Andrus
