OresmeKit initial release: plotting for GNUstep and Cocoa

Finally a public release of OresmeKit.
Started many years ago, it has finally come the moment for a first public release, since I put together even a first draft of documentation. Stay tuned for improvements and new graph types.

Oresme is useful for plotting and graphing data both native on Cocoa/MacOS as on GNUstep.

OresmeKit is a framework which provides NSView subclasses that can display data. It is useful to easily embed charts and graphs in your applications, e.g. monitoring apps, dashboards and such.
OresmeKit supports both GNUstep and Cocoa/MacOS.

An initial API Documentation is also available as well as two example in the SVN repository.

DataBasin - object inspector and updates

First, the underlying DataBasinKit framework got an important update.
[DBSoap update] now supports setting fields to null. That was quite a major detail missing: you could reset to blank even string fields.
This required me to fiddle a bit to generate the fieldsToNull list. Every field passed with an empty string value is considered to null.

<update xmlns="...">
<sobject xsi:type="sf:Account">
<id>....</id>
<fieldsToNull>AccountNumber</fieldsToNull>
<fieldsToNull>OtherCity</fieldsToNull>
<Name>New Name</Name>
</sobject>
</update>

The Object Inspector, the handy tool which allows you to inspect all field values of a record and knowing immediately their developer name given the Object Salesforce Id, how got update powers!

As the Screenshot (here on MacOS) shows, changed values show in a different color (non-updatable fields show in italics and their Cell is not editable). The total number of fields to be changed is summed up in the status field. Only fields marked as changed are updated when the Update button is pressed, other are left as-is and not overwritten for safety.

Further work has been done in the Inspector and full search filtering is now available!
Just entering a a sting will filter out the relevant rows. Both the Field Name or Developer Name are matched, as well as the content! It is thus super-easy to look for all fields (also fields not at layout) which have a certain Value. All fields false? easy as in the screenshot:

Nasty DataBasin bug fixed

DataBasin's Select-Identify, an invaluable tool for many working with salesforce.com, showed erratic behaviour: extremely hard to reproduce even by sometimes re-running the same query on the same data set, the operation would just stop without any error in the console log, trapped exception or else.

After extensive debugging I found the problem in the queryMore method of the API implementation in DataBasinKit. If queryMore had to return just one record, it would malfunction.
Technically this happened because the size reported by Salesforce.com in the queryMore is not the size of the objects of the queryMore, but of the original query.

The problem affects thus anything using queryMore: If you would select and had a batch size in download of 500, you would get a problem with 501, 1001, 1501 records and so on. 500 or 502 would just work fine. Combine this that the query size of the selectIdentify is dynamic and you get the idea on how difficult it was to reproduce.

Now it is fixed and the upcoming 0.9 version will have this fixed. All currently released DataBasin versions are affected by this bug.

DataBasin Object Inspector sorting

The fields are now sortable by Label and Developer Name. A little feature that was sorely needed within orgs with almost 500 fields per object!

This feature is currently not available in GNUstep.

DataBasin, Objective-C portable data access tool.

DataBasin: object inspection

DataBasin now sports an Object Inspector which works in the easiest way possible: insert a SalesForce.com ID: DataBasin will try to attempt do determine the object type, automatically describe it and finally load the data.

How many times did you have the need to quickly inspect an Object of which you got the ID in an exception email? Or how many times did you have to inspect the value of a field not visible on the layout?

This new feature required some extension to the underlying API of DB: the Soap class now has an identifier method which looks for an ID in all objects returned by the Describe Global in the attempt to identify the object it comes from.

The coolest addition however is in the DBSObject class itself: it is capable of loading or refreshing the values of a set of fields or of all known fields. And behold, a finesse: when loading the value of all fields, the queries will be split into executable queries without reaching the maximum SOQL size of 10K chars, as opposed to Apex Explorer which chokes if you select all fields of a very big object.