Re: [GNUe]Basic question

[Jason Cater]

Hi Julio, 

Comments inline...

On Sat, 28 Jun 2003 16:44:58 -0300
Julio Cesar Gazquez <address@hidden> wrote:

> 
> Hi. After a year looking about GNUe, I feel it is going into a path I
> like. I had my own vision about database based development (look at 
> niles.sourceforge.net. I didn't work enough on it to make it usable, but
> it has both similarities and differences with GNUe Forms).
> 
> I want to start slowly porting some in-house stuff. I like 0.5.0
> release, but designer is not there yet (details about bugs and wishes
> later), and documentation is not useful beyond a rough idea about how
> doing things.

Yes, Designer 0.5.0 had quite a few "issues". Designer has come a long way
in CVS, but I still have several bugs to deal with before we can release
0.5.1.  But I think most will agree, it's becoming much more usable. 

> The multiblock wizard works well, I got a nice effortless master-detail
> form. What else do I need?
> 
> * Lookup fields: There is a simple way to show, by example, part names
> besides an entry part number? Or even picking the part in a combo?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, so I can't comment. 

> * Reuse: I guess schemas and importing allows to define things once and
> use it along a large app. Field and entry types and sizes shouln't be
> defined once and again in each form. A good interface requires templates
> with predefined layouts and the same buttons. But I have no idea about
> how doing it.

I'll need to absorb this a little more.  I see what you are saying, but we
haven't looked at templating much before.

> * Doing database logon with no user interaction.

Yes, as Christian said in an earlier email, this can be done.  There are
several methods.  

1) Add an entry to your .netrc file. I'm not sure about the syntax of this
file, but it is something like: gnue://connection-name username <user>
password <pass>.  This would be a per-user auto-login. 

2) (The easier way)  In your connections.conf file, you can have an entry
that looks like: 

  [gnue]
  provider=....
  dbname=....
  host=....
  username=<user>
  password=<password>

The username/password lines allow for an auto-login. I use this
extensively on my development machine. This is a system-wide auto-login. 

> * Hiding the standard toolbar and menus. Those are nice for quick hacks,
> but by any means should be available in most cases.

You can define an On-Startup trigger that disables the toolbar and menu.
You can look in the mail archives for the syntax as I forget at the
moment.

> I still didn't look at GNUe-sb (PAPO isn't ported to 0.5, and seems to
> do ugly things to work with multiple tables)

I haven't looked at PAPO in a while. They were really taking GNUe Forms to
the extreme, but in the process were doing it in a non-standard way. That
really made porting to 0.5 difficult. 

> I'd like eventually to do some development about layout managers. IMHO,
> a char coordinates based layout is not the way to go. I see you are
> already aware of it, but there are no alternate layout managers so far.

Yes, as Christian pointed out, we are allowing for layout management.  If
you remember the big ordeal about the 0.5.0 release was it broke
compatability with old style form definitions.  One of the "breaks" was
that the character-based positioning attributes were moved into an xml
namespace and out of the main "forms" XML namespace. This was specifically
to allow us to add new layout managers.  

Unfortunately, that's all we've done regarding layout since the 0.5.0
release. I wouldn't expect better layout management until 0.6.0 or later. 

--
Jason Cater
GNU Enterprise