Current Tasks for mart

Table of Contents    Quick TODOs    Other things Kexi Rhetoric    Response: "Why not use QtSQL internally?"      Widgets      SQL Old Text       Bleeding edge

Quick TODOs

• Move keximdb somewhere.
• Explain how to build it on UsingSubversion (or point a link to MDBDriver).

Other things

• MDB Driver
• KSpread Integration

Memory leak on unloading driver? due to API change.

Kexi Rhetoric

It is designed to be fully usable with and without KDE desktop on Linux/Unix and MS Windows platforms.

Response: "Why not use QtSQL internally?"

Widgets

KFD allows choice of widget sets. That means:

• It can provide KDE widgets.
• Optionally, a Qt widget set could be used. (Probably only useful where an existing Qt app is being ported to used KexiDB)

SQL

Refer to 5.1:

 If you really want, QtSQL drivers can be wrapped to be KexiDB compatible.

However, wrapping QtSQL for executing SQL statements means:

• Poorer error handling. For example, how to tell with Qt whether a connection failed because the database didn't exist or because the password is wrong? (It would be good to put focus on the connection parameter widget that needs changing). QtSQL error values aren't rich enough to provide the information, and parsing the error messages from each backend is more work than implementing a cursor.
• Using QSQLDatabase::transaction, thus losing support for nested transactions.
• No choice of whether to use buffered or unbuffered cursors.
• an extra layer of indirection between KexiDB's API and the system-level DB API.

<jstaniek> mart: one main reason is that "let's compare against Qt3 not Qt4" ... or if, say, our needs require Qt5, should we wait to 2008?

Where are the Qt functions to:

• query databases for a given connection?
• manipulate stored functions and methods?

By maintaining API-level references to connections, KexiDB can support advanced features of databases. Although it's not appropriate to bloat KexiDB with many features, it is possible to develop plugins for a given database that use specific features of particular backends.

Old Text

IMPORTANT: Currently, trunk has the version of Kexi 0.8, the one that is released within KOffice 1.4, and therefore is in feature freeze. See the next section (Bleeding edge) for information on how to build the very latest version.

Bleeding edge

Currently the development branch of Kexi is not in trunk. If you have already checked out a copy of Kexi as above, the following will update your checkout to the 0.9 branch, due to be released independently of KOffice.

 cd kexi
 svn switch svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/branches/kexi/0.9/koffice/kexi

If you don't already have a Kexi checkout, and want to go straight to the development version, use:

 svn co -N svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/koffice/
 cd koffice
 svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kde-common/admin
 svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/branches/kexi/0.9/koffice/kexi

Please consult the AdvancedBuildNotes for information on how to build hidden features that are under development.