Steven Robertson
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| Posted: 02/21/2003, 12:58 AM |
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Hello
This is a bit of rant... for which I apologise in advance. I think CCS will be a great tool, but it is not there yet.
I have been trying CCS (2.0 beta) to see if it would work for our project because if it did, it could bring huge savings. However, even though I acknowledge the product is beta, there is severe lack of documentation, and there are some serious holes in the product. I have found myself trying things in a hit and miss fashion in an attempt to make it work... but I've finally have given up.
Here are some examples of the type of problems that I am experiencing...
1. I have a complex table structure involving 3 joins which I want to display in a grid. The query builder is great for creating the SQL query, but you can not add 'fields' that are not in the tables. (e.g. I have a wavfile BLOB in the table and want a flag to indicate if it is present .... IF(wavfile is not null, 'block', 'none') as wav). So I switched to from Table to SQL in CCS and it allows me to add this directly to the SQL query. However... the ORDER BY clause of raw SQL is ignored completely!! i.e. if you convert from table to SQL the resultset is not consistent.
2. So why go to all this trouble to add the IF() clause above ... well I can not figure out how to selectively display elements in a row. In this case I only want to display a 'play' link for those rows that have a wavfile present. I return from the query a fake column {wav} to do this and modify the style of the link to style="display:{wav}" in the properties. The problem with this is that the html code generator just rips it back out again when if feels like it.... and I have to keep reinserting it.
3. The idea of generating code for different platforms is great. I am using Java/Servlets on Tomcat but even though I had the compiler javadoc the generated classes, I have yet to successfully call a java function that did not throw an exeception in the servlet... How about some basic documentation guys.
I hope some of these issues may be addressed in the released 2.0 product - which I will definitely take a look at. Otherwise, I guess I'll have to wait for 3.0.
Cheers,
- Steven.
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RonB
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| Posted: 02/23/2003, 3:30 AM |
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Hi,
I think part of your problem is indeed using the beta version. It doesn't contain the help files CCS 1.0.7 does. I'd suggest going back to the CCS1.0.7 and have a look at the help files. Beta2/3 is meant for people wanting to test the beta not to evaluate the program itself. This means you should have a decent understanding of the program before you mess with the beta versions. The beta's aren't meant for evaluation.
Ron
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