| |
Mouse over this image for brief feature descriptions.
As part of the UI upgrade, we've eliminated most of the "dangling dialogs",
replacing them with a Project Pane and a Runtime Pane, each of
which is a notebook containing several features. This change will help
keep the features you need constrained to the same "sandbox", so you won't
have to wander around your screen trying to find the dialog you need.
Project Pane
We've added a Project Wizard to simplify creation of projects:
The wizard will dialog you for connection information, then
for a project filename, then for components to add to the project,
and finally will provide a project summary for your review before
finalizing the project. You can move back and forth through the
wizard sequence using the < Back and Next >
navigation buttons.
Once you've created a project, you can view and update it
using the Project Management  page:
You can drag and drop components into the project from either
the Schema Browser, or from an external Windows® Explorer
dialog.
Once you've loaded a project, you can view and edit the source
in the Source Notebook 
 :
We've added syntax highlighting
to improve the readability of script, macro, and procedure
source code.
Ad hoc query execution  is now a part of the Project Pane:
Note that this screenshot illustrates the improved context
sensitive help system.
You can drag and drop items into the query page from the
Schema Browser, load prior queries from the query history
drop-down box, and save the output of queries to either
Excel® or VARTEXT formatted files. Long running queries
can be monitored  from the
Monitor Page, or cancelled by
the Toolbar Cancel 
button.
We've added a SchemaSearch  page
to the Project Pane:
When you can't quite recall the name of that table, view,
or procedure you need to add to your project, SchemaSearch
provides a simple method for specifying as much of the
name as you can recall, including using regular expressions.
After you've entered your search criteria, TeraForge searched
the data dictionary for matching database objects,
displaying the matching objects in the bottom pane. You can then
either click on an entry to open its node in the SchemaBrowser, or copy
the entry to the clipboard to paste it into your project or component source code.
The Chart Query  page will provide the ability to compose
queries for charting via the
DBIx::Chart Perl module:
As you can see, we're still working out the details.
When completed, you'll be able to produce either static chart images,
or Perl code to regenerate the chart from your database, suitable for
use in, e.g., web server CGI or Apache mod_perl applications.
We're also developing a SchemaMerge 
feature to simplify copying and merging tables between databases.
Details of this feature will be available in the near future.
Runtime Pane
The Runtime Pane contains features relevant to the runtime
environment of a project.
The StackView  dialog has been
moved into the Runtime Pane:
Likewise, the Query Monitor dialog
has been moved into the Runtime Pane:
Current project breakpoints can now be viewed in the Breakpoint
 Page:
Finally, any shell variables used by a heredoc in the project can
be viewed, defined, and editted in the Shell Variables
 Page:
Toolbar Updates
The toolbar has been simplified to remove buttons for functions which
are now directly available in either the Project Pane or the
Runtime Pane. In addition, the button icon sizes have been reduced
to preserve screen space for project and runtime features.
Menu Updates
The View menu has been updated to provide settings for
- additional fonts
- syntax highlighting colors
- changing the syntax highlight timer
- changing the size of tabs in text features of the UI
The syntax highlighting colors applied to different source code items
can be modified using the Syntax Highlight Dialog:
The Help system has been significantly upgraded. In most of the
UI feature pages, you'll see the context-sensitive help button
 . Clicking this button will display a small
help text dialog describing the features of the associated
feature page.
In addition, we've included links from the Help menu to the User Guide
and Tutorial documents, which will be opened in your current default
browser.
The next beta version of TeraForge, containing all these updates,
plus numerous functional enhancements, is scheduled to be released May 1, 2005.
We hope you find these improvements as useful as we have; if you have
any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to send them
to
teraforge@presicient.com.
|
