[gnome-db] Re: question: in memory table representation: please help

[Neil Zanella <nzanella gmail com>]

> On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 16:07 -0600, Neil Zanella wrote:

> so, what are you exactly trying to do? Why do you want that in-memory
> representation of the table?

Because I'm writing a very special library to do something never seen or done
before... it's somewhat complicated to explain, but I will try...
(right now it works
quite well, just that it's not implemented as a library) :-)

--- BACKGROUND ---------------------------------------------------------

The name of the new library, libsqlui, comes from the fact that its users, whom
will be aquainted with XML and SQL, but not necessarily C, use three XML
files to build the specifics of their user interface. The three files correspond
to the three parts of MVC. The library I am building aims at building a generic
controller with pluggable methods customizable via an XML file.

The controller allows the user to relate generic database tables to the user
interface by interrelating data and widgets by neat of neat and clean API.

Basically, I'm taking some of the burden from the C of MVC off the user's
back and plugging it in my special library.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, I need an in memory representtion of tables, cause these will allow
my library to construct them so it can talk with my users. My users will
be specifying table representations more than anything else when
building their GUIs. (BTW, all of this is already done basically,
just needs to be cleaned up, and moved to GNOME-DB for
maximum portability. It just seems to me that libgda is the
best choice for the task at hand. Just that I don't know
how much of what I need it's going to support, but
whatever is missing I'm gonna have to recode
myself. There's not much to debate here: I've
already built the system and it works, and is
as a matter of fact a pleasure to use, but
now I want it to make use of libgda.

> If you want to get data from a database, use the gda_connection_*
> functions, no need to deal with GdaTable, which is only, as you noted,
> an in-memory representation of a table. You can either create it from an
> existing GdaDataModel (gda_table_new_from_model), or create it by hand,
> in which case you need to add all fields, set all attributes on the
> fields, add the data (gda_data_model_append_row), etc

I plan to let my library call those functions so the user of my library
dosen't need to worry about much programming at all: the user worries
about concepts, and the library carries out the specifics. ;-)

Actually, it's not as complex as it sounds... I'm just exploiting the power
of generic programming in an area where it has not yet been applied.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So please let me know whether I can access libgda's in memory table
representations (in which case, please let me know how to use them),
or whether I should reinvent the wheel.

Thanks,

Neil

P.S. my library is going to be open source and will accomodate behavioral
patterns conceived by other users so long as they can explain them and there
are enough developers willing to code them.