root/tags/dabo-0.5/ChangeLog

See the Subversion log for all the details.

Dabo-0.5 (2005-11-30) (Revision 1610):

Added a new class, DataSet, which lets you issue sql queries against local
Dabo data, not just against the backend. You can query, sort, and update
individual DataSets, and even join multiple DataSets - all without making a
call to the backend database server. 

Began the work of making an embedded, internal, database engine (SQLite).
Starting with future releases, SQLite will be an integral part of Dabo.

Improved the autoBindEvents() to bind to matching methods in all parent
containers, not just the form. Auto-binding of events now works so well that
it is the default; you no longer have to manually call it. This is now
*really cool*.

Added a basic framework for drawing shapes on any window. Once created, the
shapes are accessible with an object reference. This should make dealing with
DC's a thing of the past for most uses. Way cool!

Sorted out MDI/SDI issues. By default, dForm on Windows MDI children and
dFormMain on Windows will be MDI parents. On other platforms, both dForm and
dFormMain will be SDI by default. The above statement is true for datanav
applications (ones generated by the AppWizard). The pure-Dabo default is for
SDI forms. In any case, you may change this by setting dabo.MDI.

Improved the datanav Quick Report feature, which can print a list of the
current records, mimicing the browse page, or a whole page of information on
one record, mimicing the edit page. Added the ability for the user to save
the generated report form for editing with the Report Designer or editing the
rfxml directly.

Improved showContextMenu(), and sorted out the difference between
MouseRightClick and ContextMenu events.

Fixed bug in Find dialog which would segfault on Windows and Mac. Added
replace functionality.

dCheckBox now supports 3 state mode, (True, False and None).

Fixed bug in dbMySQL that would interpret longtext or longblob fields as
ints.

Fixed dBackend to properly send Python None values as NULLs.

dForms now know how to read in cdxml files, created by the upcoming UI
Designer.

Fixed a bug in colorTupleFromString() that failed to return the correct
value.

Fixed some encoding issues with dReportWriter. 

Added some handling for broken database connections.

Added some useful properties to dTreeView that improve its display and
editability. 

Fixed some problems with the Hit event and dSpinner.

Improved report writer's paragraph handling.

Further removed user code from direct wx access in a few places. User code
can still get at the wx structures though, just not quite as easily.

Fixed mixed indentation problems, made some code cleaner, and added/edited
lots of docstrings. 

Added some useful functions to dMenu to remove items and get references to 
menu items. 

Added a DynamicEnabled property to dMenuItem. Set this to a function which 
will get run when the parent menu is shown to determine whether the menu
item is enabled or not. 

Menu.Children will now contain object references to Dabo menus and menu
items.

Improved dToolbar somewhat, in anticipation of fully objectifying the
individual toolbar items. The ultimate goal is for the interface to
a dToolbar to be similar to that of dMenu.

Fixed some problems in dBizobj that make working with multi-table select
statements more sane.

Fixed a bug in dGrid which resulted in very slow deletion of rows, for
instance
after requerying the recordset and getting fewer rows that were in the grid
before.

Added properties ShowInTaskBar and FloatOnParent to dForm, and actually
made the following properties work: ShowMinButton, ShowMaxButton,
ShowCloseButton, ShowSystemMenu, TinyTitleBar.

Added a picklist mode to datanav Forms, showing only the select and browse
pages for a user to pick a record. The form dismisses on escape, and returns
the selected row's pk on enter.

Handling of None values in many UI controls, the bizobj, and the database is
much improved.

Added middle button and scroll mouse events.

Added some hooks to datanav.Form that allow developers to control the
select options for given fields. This would allow you to put, for example,
a radiogroup with a few choices instead of the default textbox.

Added connection manager to dApp, which maintains a set of open database
connections that your forms can reference by name. Added Connection property 
to dForm.

Fixed bugs in and improved dSplitter, dListControl, dControlItemMixin, and
dListBox.

Phwew! All that in 7 weeks.



Dabo-0.4.2 (2005-10-07) (Revision 1418):
Added PrimaryBizobj property to dForm, which can replace calls to getPrimaryBizobj().

Added Accepted property to dOkCancelDialog, which gets set automatically if the
user pressed "OK".

Added AutoSQL, UserSQL, CurrentSQL, LastSQL properties to dCursor and dBizobj.
When time to requery, the SQL will come from UserSQL if set, or AutoSQL will
be regenerated. 

Fixed a bug that kept changes to a new record from getting committed.

Added DefaultValues property to bizobj.

Added ListSelection and ListDeselection events to dListControl. Added properties
MultipleSelect, HitIndex, LastSelectedIndex, HeaderVisible, HorizontalRules,
and VerticalRules. Changed the behavior of both dListControl and dListBox so that merely selecting an item doesn't raise the Hit event; instead, it raises a ListSelection event, and if another item had been previously selected, it raises a ListDeselection event. Hit is only raised from double-clicking on an item, or by pressing Enter.

Added new property to dTextBox: StrictDateEntry. Changed the code for
interpreting dates entered by the user to allow for some less explicit
formats (YYYYMMDD, YYMMDD, and MMDD). If StrictDateEntry is False (the
default), these other formats will be used when interpreting dates
entered by the user.

Added field-level validation to the framework.

Improved support for decimal.Decimal, both at the database level and in
dTextBox.

Added new auto event binding, which automatically binds events based on any
defined callback functions. For example, if you have a method onMouseEnter()
defined, the dEvents.MouseEnter will automatically be bound to that method.
Inspired by PythonCard.

Added RegID property to forms, that allows for object registration
with the form. Not all objects require RegIDs, but if they have one,
they must be unique among all objects in a form. A reference to that
object can then be gotten from any other object by calling
'self.Form.getObjectByRegID(<regid>)'.

Linked RegID to the auto event binding, so that if a form has a method
of onHit_cmdOK(), and has a button with a RegID of 'cmdOK', the
cmdOk's Hit will get bound to the form's callback, automatically.

Improved dGrid and dColumn. Many properties added, and you are now in much
finer control over the display of grid column headers, grid cell attributes,
grid cell editors and renderers, and the grid itself. 

Began work of allowing case-insensitive property values for properties that
take string values, and for properties that take a limited number of values
where the first letter is unique, you can set the property by just using the
first letter. dTextBox.Alignment = "c" sets the property to "Center", for 
example.

Modified dBizobj, dCursorMixin, and dBackend so that the user can specify 
the Unicode Encoding to use. Changed the default encoding from latin-1 to
utf-8.

Added feature to optionally draw sizer outlines on any form that uses dSizers.
This is currently accessible via an option in the View menu when the base
menu bar is in use, or you can turn it on/off programatically.

Grids now remember the column that is sorted, and resort when next instantiated.

Added support in dReportWriter for report groups and report variables, and 
dynamic band heights (based on the height of contained objects). Added showExpr,
which is an expression that evaluates at runtime and if true, shows the object
in the report, and not if false. 

Improved the automatic print preview report format in datanav. It now:

    + prints column headers

    + mirrors the font size, column width, cell vertical and horizontal
      alignment, and column height of the grid

    + mirrors the font size, header height, vertical and horizontal 
      alignment of the grid headers

    + automatically reorients to landscape if the detail flows beyond the width
      of portrait

    + stops printing more columns if doing so would result in overflowing the
      right margin

Key bindings are now case-insensitive.

Improved docstrings and API documentation.


Dabo-0.4.1 (2005-08-30) (Revision 1226):

Improved test framework for uiwx. Now you can run ui/uiwx/test.py and get
almost all of the dabo controls in one form, and they are the same tests 
that you get when you run an individual control directly.

Factored out the saving/restoring of user settings out of dApp into 
the separate dUserSettingProvider class, which can be subclassed or
overridded by the developers. Added properties UserSettingProvider
and UserSettingProviderClass to dApp. 

Dabo user settings are no longer saved to .userSettings.ini in the app
directory, but are saved to the user's home directory (in ~.dabo/) or
if on Windows, in <User Profile>/Application Data/Dabo/.

Support for SQLite added. As of this moment, Dabo supports several major 
open-source database backends: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, and SQLite.
Next on the list should be Oracle, Sybase, and MS-SQL.

Started work implementing a Quick Report in the datanav library, which 
replaces the old HTML Print Preview. This uses the fledgling Dabo Report
Writer to create a PDF rendition of the dataset. 

Added new property for all controls: StatusText. When set, and when the 
form has a status bar, that text will show in the form's status bar when
the mouse enters the control. 

Expanded the dabo.ui.strToBmp() function to accept an optional scale factor
or width/height values. If they are passed, the returned bitmap image is 
sized to those values.

Added an optional parameter to the bizobj and cursor's getDataSet() method.
If you send a list of field names, only those fields are returned. 

Fixed some lingering bugs in the dabo.ui.uiwx package and the datanav
lib. dWizard works better now. Improved dGauge, dLine, dBox, dRadioBox, 
dListBox, dToolBar, and dSizers.

Added simple decimal support to dTextBox.

Work continues on dGrid, specifically dColumn is now better worked 
into the "Dabo Way".

Added dabo.trace() function, that will drop you into pdb.

dConnectInfo reworked to have better property names.

Removed dependency on PIL and reportlab from Dabo. These are dependencies
still, but only if you try to run a report.

Added dabo.lib.StopWatch.StopWatch class, which is a light Python 
stopwatch with start(), stop(), reset() methods and Value property.

This is a partial list. Both Ed and Paul have been very busy with Dabo
since 0.4 a few weeks ago. Lots of bugfixes and enhancements were made,
and we encourage everyone to upgrade.


Dabo-0.4 (2005-08-08) (Revision 1132):

Cleaned up the initialization of properties. No more initStyleProperties();
user code just puts their props in initProperties() or sends them to the
constructor in the properties arg or as separate named arguments. The
framework sorts out when the properties need to be set in the object
construction cycle.

Improved sizers by separating out the Halign and Valign properties, 
eliminating the need to use the 'alignment' flags parameter. Added the 
'Parent' property, making it easy to reference the control that 'owns' 
the sizer. Also added the convenience method 'append1x(item)', which is 
shorthand for writing 'append(item, 1, "expand")', since it is used so 
frequently. The grid sizers now have 'isRowGrowable()' and 'isColGrowable()'
methods for checking the status of any row/column.

New dGrid, with dColumn and Header objects available for reference.

Lots of convenience functions written, such as those designed for simplified 
access to common dialogs, are now built into the dabo.ui module. Examples: 
getFile(), getColor(), getBitmap(), and the getString() functions, which all 
create, show and destroy the required dialog window, and then return the 
result. So, to present the user with a font selection dialog, just call 
dabo.ui.getFont(), and the selected font will be returned (or None if they 
canceled). Similarly, to show a common messagebox and get the response, 
just use dabo.ui.info(), dabo.ui.stop(), or dabo.ui.areYouSure(). 

doDefault() much faster now (thanks to Alex Martelli)

Support for decimal.Decimal.

New classes: dColorDialog, dToolBar.

Work on the report writer and report designer progresses. The report designer
is now in the daboide project, not here in dabo anymore.

We finally have distutils support. To install Dabo, do the standard
"python setup.py install". Thanks to limodou for submitting the patch.


Dabo-0.3.2 (2005-03-21) (Revision 959):

Work continued on the Dabo report writer and report designer. The
writer will now read and write the rfxml file format, and will do some 
simple reports. The designer will edit the rfxml files, again, with simple
formats. This isn't ready to use yet but the foundation is in place.

cursorToXML() added.

Encoding property added to databases.

dBitmap introduced.
dWizard introduced.
dTreeView introduced.

dGrid is being refactored, and is almost done. For a short time, it can
be found as dGridX.

We worked hard trying to get window closing not to segfault on Windows, 
to get icons to display correctly on Mac, and to optimize Dabo in some key
bottleneck areas. We've greatly improved Dabo's performance on all platforms,
and Dabo now behaves less differently on each platform.

Improved data binding: controls don't need to bind to a bizobj, but to any 
object expression.

Improved Firebird and PostgreSQL support.

Lots of improvements and bug fixes, in all three tiers.


Dabo-0.3.1 (2005-02-16) (Revision 802):

Separated creation of dCursor from dBizobj.
Added option to automatically create a dPanel in dForm.
Further Daboized dListControl.
Fixed display of a few of our icons on Mac.
Added bindKey() method, which binds a keycombo like "Ctrl+D" to a function.
Daboized dMenu, dMenuItem, and dMenuBar.
Minimal Tkinter (dCheckbox) working again (testing only).
Added ActiveControl property to dForm.
Various dSizer improvements were made.
We moved various things to better places in the source tree.
Connection info now saved in XML format.
Localization framework added. Courtesy Vladimir Sekissov.
Added Children property, which contains a list of a container's children.
dCommandButton is now known as dButton.


Dabo-0.3 (2005-01-10):

New UI controls added:
    dFileDialog.py
    dListBox.py
    dListControl.py
    dSplitForm.py
    dSplitter.py

GridSizer added. Method calls to all sizers greatly simplified.

Menus simplified, removing wx-specific calls.

My favorite UI debugging tool: getMouseObject()

Framework classes now consistently use the standard initialization 
methods: initProperties, initEvents, etc.

Child requeries and transaction support added to bizobj

Bizobjs now support the relationSpecs.rsxml format for adding child 
relations.

Support for fulltext-type searches by word added.

Auxiliary (one-shot) cursors added to main cursors for better support 
of different backends.

Improved unicode support in cursors.

Added support for PostgreSQL. Added template to ease creation of new 
backend support scripts.

appWizard: added support for parent/child/grandchild/... relationships; 
improved FieldSpecEditor.

appWizard/dDataNav* classes:
    changed all wx.Sizers to dSizers
    added "-ignore-" to visually indicate search criteria that will not be used
    added save/restore of values on search page.
    added 'Matches Words' option for fulltext searches
    fixed bugs with searches for boolean values

Controls:
    Now auto-name themselves. Unique name enforcement added.
    Added _IsContainer attribute to distinguish controls that can add other controls to themselves.
    Added support for setting colors by name instead of RGB tuple.
    Fixed resizing bug that would not allow a resized object to be made smaller.


Dabo-0.2 (2004-09-20):

Continued improving FireBird database support, improved MySQL support. Added
preliminary SQLite support.

Save passwords encrypted.

Added logger objects to send program output to, instead of directly to stdout.

Began abstraction of Tkinter at purely an experimental level.

Added some new controls, such as a better date control and a combo box. 

Brought in some Foxpro string functions from the openfox project.

New event model, greatly simplifying the binding of events, the raising of events,
and the subclassing of events to define new events.

Added preliminary unicode support to the cursor level. 
    

Dabo-0.1.1 (2004-06-13):

Dabo-0.1 (2004-05-10):