This is a log of my experience with knoda. I hope it will help see what a new person to this software sees, and that people looking at this can use this to improve both the software and the documentation.
My background: I have used linux for about 15 years, and have spend much of my working life as a computer geek. I have never been a database administrator. I have a hobby tree farm and it is now getting to the point where spreadsheets no longer work to keep track of what I've got, and which trees were planted when, and just where are the dogwoods, and how many Japanese fantail willow do I have? I figure if I stumble over something, then it's probably worth a look. Turns out that knoda is not available as a binary package. I brought down the tarballs, hk_classes built without even a warning as far as I could see. Knoda fussed a bit about linking against a module. In the first ten minutes I was able to create a pair of tables, Names for scientific and common names of my trees, and Trees which has thier height, location. The idea is to link these across so that I can enter an abbreviation once, and the rest fills in. (In passing: I was not able to get this far at all with rekall (rekall has serious issues with python 2.5+) kexi doesn't do reports, and glom wants to use a different port on postgres, and I don't want to change my postgres to suit it.) Connecting to postgresql was a snap, but I already had this working for rekall. Generating the two tables was easy. Form work is (so far) a bit confusing. The tutorial doesn't explain the function of Id, of Identifier, of the (number) after the datasource, and that of Label for lineedit field. My assumption is that forms are stored as hidden tables, that the Id is an identifier of this element in the database, that the (number) in an index into a list of tables in this database. Haven't figured out a plausible explanation for Identifier yet, nor why the data field has a label that can be separate from the textlabel. Some of this will doubtless come clear as I continue to work through the tutorial, but it's clear as mud in the chapter on forms. My expectation: The first time a panel is referenced, there is either a mention, or a link to an explanation of each item on that page. The explanation should state *what* it is, *when* I (as a user) would need to know about it, and a pointer to further examples. E.g. "Editlines have a label, which for now you can ignore. This later will allow us to automate the form makeing process, and remove the need for having a separate TextLabel." As a wish along those lines, right now to add a field for a form I have to: 1. Select edit line. 2. click about where I want it. 3. adjust position. 4. adjust size. 5. pick a label (default to field name) 6. select TextLabel 7. clcik about where I want it. 8. type it's name in the Label field. (Why does a text label have a tool tip?) For a lot of things, it may be easier to have a "quick form" with is a column of field names, and a column of editlines. This allows quick prototyping of a form, allows the user to enter a bunch of typical data, and find out all the places where the editlines are too small. >From this form, then, it can be re-arranged for better use later. This brings a more general notion. It should be very quick to do something the easy way. That easy way can then be refined. So far so good. I'm very impressed with what I can do so far. It works, it's doesn't require that I learn SQL (yet...) I haven't made it crash yet. All are points in it's favour. As I continue with my discoveries, I'll post to the list. -- Sherwood Botsford Sherwood's Forests Warburg, Alberta T0C 2T0 http://www.sherwoods-forests.com 780-848-2548 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Hk-classes-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hk-classes-discuss
