Beefed up joins

From a developer’s point of view, the agileBase platform can be thought of as, at it’s heart, a tool for building database applications. The starting point is building and connecting tables and views, then of course the platform supplies lots of additions: the great user interface, powerful business logic, workflows, security rules etc.

We’ve always tried to help the administrator by providing the user interface and features to remove a lot of the hard work of all of those stages. For example, whenever a major change to a view is made, the system automatically re-creates any dependent views too.

Recently, we’ve had some conversations and meetings with developers and administrators, to see how the administration interface can be further developed to fit in with best development practices, particularly when working on more complex projects. Thanks to all involved for their time, effort and enthusiasm!

There’ll be lots coming out of this continuing work, but the first fruits can already be seen with a release that beefs up one of the core tasks when creating database views – working with joins. When building complex systems, views are often broken down into many ‘sub-views’ for convenience, then joined together to form the output the user sees.

Working with these joins is now easier – rather than hunt for each joined view when working on different components, you can simply click a view link to move to it’s own management screen.

Because a picture’s worth a thousand words, the joins screen also shows a graphical representation of the connections in a view – both the joins in that view and any other views that join to it. So you can quickly see which views have lots of dependencies. Here are a couple more examples:

This progresses the ‘graph’ visualisation work started last month.

There’s a lot more in the pipeline too, which we look forward to talking about soon.