Browse-mode Improvements – First Week

GSoC 2011’s first week coding time has over. In this week, I mostly worked on feature to remember table’s sorting in browsing mode.

Here are things I did this week:

• I finalized the “recently used tables” feature. I did most of this feature in community bonding period and worked on this have helped me to be familiar with phpMyAdmin code base. In the start of this week, I did some changes on the javascript for this feature. I remove the inline javascript and use jQuery instead. This feature have been merged to the official master branch. Thanks to my mentor, Marc, for merging this.
• Several things regarding table’s sorting:
• I added functionality to remember table’s sorting when browsing tables. So, when we browse a table, click a column header to sort, go to other page, and back to the browse page, we will get the table sorted as last time we sorted it.
• By default, this feature is enabled. To disable this feature, I added a checkbox field in Settings page under Main frame -> Browse mode -> Remember sorting.
• I added checking, so table sorting feature will only work in “Browse” tab. So, it won’t work when user execute the SELECT FROM query from SQL tab.
• I created new table in phpMyAdmin database to store table sorting preferences persistently. This table have 4 columns: username, db_name, table_name, prefs. The preferences is stored per user and per table. I planned to use this table to store other preferences for other browsing-related features.
• I added new function for PMA_Table class, to load and store the sorting preferences. The functions can be used again for managing other browsing-related preferences.
• I added documentation for the new functions and feature.
• I started working on the next feature: column resizing. Currently, we can resize column when browsing tables. You may try this in the demo page. But, at the moment, this feature is not working if we sorted the table or goto next page on table’s pagination. This is because the ajax issue. I will work on this next week.

What I will do next week:

• Continue working on column resizing feature.
• Start working on column reordering.

That’s for this week report. Have a nice weekend, everybody! 🙂

P.S.: I separated my work on several branch: recent, tablesort, and colresize. And I merged them in my master branch. Hope this will be easier to manage my work.

 

Plans for The First Week

GSoC 2011’s coding time will be officially started tomorrow. During the next twelve weeks, all GSoC-ers will try to fulfill what they’ve written in their proposal. For me, I will implement features to enhance browse-mode in phpMyAdmin. Here is my plans for the first week:

• Finishing the “recently-used tables” feature, which is mostly done during the GSoC community bonding period.
• Proceed to do the second feature: remember the last way user sorted tables.

Hope that the next twelve weeks will be fun and productive weeks! 🙂

 

Tired of going back and forth from table to table? Try this: “recently used tables”

If you have a large set of databases and tables, you may feel that it is uncomfortable to move from a table in a database to other table in different database. Some people already requested to have a recently used tables in phpMyAdmin (see: feature tracker), so they can jump directly between recently used tables in different databases.

I’ve been working on this feature and a demo of my work can be seen in http://demo.phpmyadmin.net/gsoc-aris/ (thanks to Michal Čihař for setting up demo for phpMyAdmin GSoC-ers). What I’ve done:

• add a new class RecentTable
• add “LeftRecentTable”, maximum number of recent tables shown, in Settings
• add configuration [‘Servers’][$i][‘recent’], table in pma database for “persistent” recent tables across user’s session

To use the “recent tables” feature in the demo server, basically you need not to setup anything. Just go to a table and you’ll see the recent table drop-down list in the left navigation frame. The default “LeftRecentTable” is set to 5 and you can change it to any number greater than or equals to zero (set to zero will disable this feature). However, you may notice that the recent tables list will disappear when you have logged out and login again. To keep the recent tables list persistent across sessions, you have to setup the “recent” table in phpMyAdmin database. To create the table, you may use the script in “phpmyadmin/scripts/create_tables.sql”.

The recent tables list is recorded per user, so no need to worry that the other users may see your recently used tables. 🙂