I added a huge new feature to Squidhead, which I think deserves some mention. I’ve added another that’s not as cool, but still worth mentioning. I think I’ll try and get it published out to Squidhead users in the next few days.
Feature: Paged and Sortable List views
Basically this feature adds a paging view to the list view, and that view is sortable by each column in the shown in the view. The compelling part of this feature is that it isn’t doing the sorting and paging in ColdFusion, it writes a stored procedure that can present a sorted query of a particular page size. Because this happens in the database it’s blazingly fast.
Writing these types of stored procedures is really annoying. SQL 92 specification prevents variables in the LIMIT, TOP, and ORDER BY clauses. In order to pull down paged lists of records from the database requires adding an extra temporary column that stores row count and only including particular ranges. Then to do order you have to do a switch case block for every order by possibility. It’s the annoying, repetitive code that was designed just so someone could write a code generator to automatically write it.
Feature: List View Filter
The list view filter feature allows you to configure what columns get displayed in the list view of your generated applications. One of the first things that I do when I go to turn a generated application into a real application is to start manually limiting which columns get shown as inevitably there is a text field that needs to go. This can now be done by simply altering the table.xml that is generated by Squidhead, and setting the excludefromlistview property to true.
Northwind and Sakila support
This isn’t really a feature per see, but I’ve started testing against Northwind for MSSQL and Sakila for MySQL. Both of these are sample databases provided by the vendors. They expose a wide range of database features for each one. By doing testing against them, I found a number of errors and bugs in the Squidhead code that have been rectified. Going forward, Squidhead features will not be released unless they pass these tests.
Like I said earlier, I’d like to get these features out in the wild in the next few days.
tpryan.blog 