One of the enhancements we wanted to make for the M3 milestone involves
prompting to connect to the database at certain points, as we are
currently dependent on live database information to provide all of our
functionality. I wanted to post some thoughts on this to see if anyone
else had additional thoughts on this functionality. Also, bugzilla is
currently down, so I couldn't enter this into an ER.
Here are some thoughts:
- Prompting should be done at specific points in time where a user has
requested to do something that requires a database connection. This
would include things like generating entities from tables, and
generating tables from entities.
- For situations where you are in a dialog and being connected is not
required, but would be helpful, it would be nice to have a way to
connect from that dialog (Button or a Link). This would apply to the
Add Java Persistence wizard and Java Persistence properties page.
- This leaves the issue of not getting resolution problems and DB
selections in the UI when disconnected. For this case, it has been
suggested that some sort of visual indicator could be used. It has
also been suggested that there could be a "Not connected" (warning
level) problem that stays around until you connect. Basically all of
this is of the intent to help the user with reconnecting to the DB
after starting a new session. Note: The Database Explorer already has
a connect/disconnect button in their
ExplorerView, so we don't want to duplicate this functionality.
Whatever we do, we want to steer clear of annoying the user. Another
thing to consider is that we will eventually support off-line database
functionality, which would mean that working off-line would become a
much more common use case.
Let me know if you have any thoughts on how we could help the user out
for the 3rd case (problems and UI). Perhaps we should look at adding
off-line schema support first and then determine what would be
sufficient for the 3rd case?
-Neil
Neil Hauge
TopLink Tools
Oracle Corporation
neil.hauge@xxxxxxxxxx
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