Daniel Fagerstrom wrote:
Now, I find it rather strange to keep the SQLTransformer and ESQL
because some people find them being the best way to do simple reporting
at the same time as the community strongly oppose building a modern
replacement of them in CTemplate, because they represent bad practice.
Anyway, for the time beeing I think it is better to focus on making it
as easy as possible to use SQL from flowscripts and present the result
sets in CTemplate. Then if we don't get it easy enough we can start to
think about doing part of ESQL in CTemplate.
SQLTransformer has at least three things going for it:
* It is declarative, it is not possible to program using
JDBC api or some other api in it.
* You can't access result set or statement or connection,
you are abstracted from database access code.
* It is scalable, it does not buffer complete result set
in memory.
These all are good things (dunno how things in ESQL - have not looked into it),
and better than passing JDBC result set into the CTemplate.
If you are interested in building a modern replacement for it, please go ahead:
propose a solution using CTemplate or Flow/CTemplate. I, for one, would like to
see a solution which preserves above two points of SQLTransformer and is modern.
... Seems to me such solution should have some CTemplate tag (unless it is done
in Flow) to query database and return a List type live wrappers around ResultSet
with limited functionality which can be iterated over in CTemplate. And
regarding pure CTemplate vs Flow+CTemplate: "flowless" solution has own
advantages in pure publishing/reporting environments, and is the closest thing
you can have comparing with SQLTransformer.
Vadim
