SQLContainer contribution -> generic filter component

Flow
1

Hi,

for the use inside the
redVoodo.org
 project i have prepared an addon for the SQLContainer. It offers enhancements for the SQLContainer and provides new UI components. Based on that addon a filter component can be created which uses the meta information of the domain model container (SQLContainer with informations to show) and generates a filter UI component including wildcard support at runtime. The filters built by the component are applied to the SQLContainer which refreshes its states.

A blog post about it can be seen here:
blog-post

As a main enhancement, foreign reference filtering can be processed very easy. For instance, if the table personaddress has a reference to city, the addon allows you to filter the persontable by the cityName.

But my questions are…

  1. So far i have prepared the contribution and would like to contribute it to vaadin? How should i continue? I thought about creating a patch in svn and post it to you?
  2. My contribution has a dependency to the custom field addon.
    http://vaadin.com/addon/customfield
     For normal i think that vaadin addons should not have a dependency to other addons, right? Should i remove the dependency and copy the CustomField.java from the custom field addon to the SQLContainer addon?

Thanks for your help,
Florian

2

I have started work on something very similar, but for my JPA 2.0 Criteria Query container (which also supports the kind of foreign key/linked object filtering you describe). I would love to see what you did, and perhaps share/enhance the user interface. Is there any way I could look at your source ?

If you wish to contact me by e-mail, you can go to the http://code.google.com/p/criteriacontainer/people/list page; clicking on the … in my name will reveal my gmail address.

3

Good to know. It would be great if we could merge our implementations. Currently the addon is based on the SQLContainer since the SQLContainer offeres additional filters.

I am going to send you the sources by mail. And i wil create a little demo for it. So you can directly start playing with it. But it will take until Monday or Tuesday next week.

Thanks, Florian

4

  1. For contributions to Vaadin itself or to official add-ons, see
    this post
    . Briefly, you can post a patch to a ticket, and for major contributions, we ask you to sign a contributor agreement. Then again, nothing prevents you from keeping your code as an add-on.

  2. In general, when working on a separate add-on, I don’t see a problem with dependencies to other add-ons as long as it is clearly documented what dependencies there are. There will always be people who don’t read the documentation but just ask “why doesn’t this work”, but that is not your fault anymore. By not making a copy, you’ll have someone else taking care of much of the maintenance. However, in this case, the “owner” of the SQLContainer add-on is Vaadin Ltd, while CustomComponent is still mostly a hobby project of mine and one other contributor.

We hope to mostly eliminate the need for the CustomComponent add-on in some future Vaadin versions by a combination of other improvements in Vaadin and perhaps integrating parts of CustomComponent in Vaadin core. However, there is no schedule for this yet.

5

Thanks a lot. I got the “contribution agreement” yet and i am going to sign it and send it to vaadin ldt.

Thanks for your help!
Florian Pirchner