First week report - Relation Interface Improvements

I worked on 'Relation Interface Improvements' feature during the first week of GSoC and was able to successfully implement it. Now the cumbersome task of setting relational constraints has been made somewhat easy and is less error-prone. 

 

With the changes the long dropdown to select foreign column has been split to two dropdowns, one to select the foreign table and the other to select the foreign column. I also extended this to support cross database relations with an additional dropdown to select the foreign database for both internal and InnoDB types. Here is what the relation view interface looks like now.

 

 

So, when the user selects the database, the entries in the table dropdown are filtered only to show tables in that database and column dropdown is filtered in a similar manner when a table is selected. Own database is selected by default as it's more common to setup relations inside the same database.

 

Checking relational integrity feature was already supporting cross database relations. I added table name to the displayed text to make it clearer. I also updated a couple of FAQs in the documentation related to these features. 

 

For the next I have planned to implement 'Find and replace by column' feature which is quite long due. I have some preliminary work on it, and plan to finish implementing it during this week.

Coding begins

According to GSOC 2013 timeline, the coding period begins tomorrow. It's quite exiting as we get to do some hands on coding. I have pretty much completed reading documentation and getting myself familiarize with the code. Meanwhile I pulled merge requests for a couple of bugs and those fixes were incorporated to the code.

I am going to implement 'Improve relational view interface' feature during the first week. This is based on feature requests RFE #1283, RFE #1233 and RFE#175 from the feature request tracker. I've done some investigations related to these features during the last week.

With the implementation choosing the foreign column would be made a two step process. First the user chooses the foreign table from the table drop down which would filter the column in the columns drop down accordingly. Hence choosing the correct column would be much easier. Finally, the relational system would be enhanced to support cross database relations. Relational view interface would facilitate adding/editing these relations with an additional drop down to chose the database.

I will use 'relView' branch of my repository to implement this feature. However it is still empty, I will make a commit when the new code is stable.