There are a few tools that claim to generate al the databas access stuff for you, and I tried a few. While the promise is appealing, I found little advantage to this, since my data is rarely a one-table affair. Even my small status tables are two-table: the first has the statuses and the next has the descriptions in various languages. A sales order would have many tables: header general data, header partner information, item general data, item pricing, and so on. I most often have no use for automatically generated views. In my tests, I ended-up having to clean and remove more automatic code than I used.
It is my view that any program working with a data model of moderate to high complexity will gain very limited benefits from such a feature.
Mark, if your programs will be windows based, your developers can use ADO to connect to MSSQL, much in the same way they used to with VB . I do this myself. There are examples in other threads on how to do it. If your progra,ms are going to ne cross-platform, I suggest to have a look at monkeybread database add-ons.
Louis, thanks for the input. I have been checking out the web sites of third party add-on developers, including MBS. I assume some of these tools will be required to round out my Xojo toolbox.
Up to this point most of my apps have been web-based, and are well-supported on both PC and Mac. However, I find myself having to create a lot of “utility” code lately, mainly using Windows Powershell. A number of these scripts gather data from various sources, format it, and then upload to SQL. I think I can use Xojo for this, either as desktop apps with an interface for the user to select criteria, or as console apps that run on a scheduler. One script that comes to mind uses CURL to extract data from a web service, and since MBS has a CURL method I think that will be the first one I try to tackle.
Some of my apps have fairly complex data models, albeit mainly one-to-many and many-to-one relationships. I have used a couple of code generation tools that handle these relationships very well, but they do generally create a lot of code. I prefer my apps to be as lightweight as possible. However, I still think Xojo could benefit from having a more robust ability to handle a data model. Flexible is MORE important, and Xojo has it, but tools to make developer’s lives easier would also be nice to have.
I also can recommend Bob Keeneys Active Record for all easy Plug and Play Database programming no need to handle the SQL things by Code and in combination with XOJO Container Controls really cool