JADE Environment Development Ideas

As part of recent work, we needed to decommission an old application, with its initialize/finalize methods in particular referring to redundant code.

Previously, we'd have just deleted the initialize/finalize methods via a JCF command, but there's now been some validation introduced which prevents doing that when they're referenced by an application.

Okay, so we'll delete the application as well then (that's good, we don't like clutter anyways). As all our changes are deployed incrementally, we'd do something like this in a JCF command file.

Delete Application <schema>::<application>

However, this JCF command is not supported like others may also have assumed upfront.

The JCF command file support needs to be updated to cover all scenarios where an entity can be deleted or renamed via the IDE. This is particularly relevant in the context of improving source control, for which there needs to be a way of deploying deletes & renames incrementally in a consistent manner.

So far, I've identified the following entities which aren't covered like you might expect by the documented JCF commands:

• Applications

• Libraries

• Exported Package Entities (while a package can be deleted, we can't remove a specific entity from the package via JCF).

• External Component Libraries (ActiveX & .NET)

• Exposures (C# & web services)

• Dynamic Property Clusters

• Relational Views (ODBC & RPS) (while we can exclude tables/columns, we can't delete/rename RPS mappings via JCF).

• External Databases

• HTML Documents
  

Once completed, it'd be ideal if functionality gaps of this nature were regarded as a fault before/after new schema entities are introduced to ensure complete JCF support is kept up-to-date.

UPDATE (18/06/20):

List of commands specified below in preferred priority order.

Delete Application <schema>::<application>

Rename Application <schema>::<application> <new-name>

Delete Library <schema>::<library>

Rename Package <schema>::<package> <new-name>

Delete [Jade]ExportedType <schema>::<exported-package>::<type>

Delete [Jade]ExportedFeature <schema>::<exported-package>::<type>::<feature>

Delete [Jade]ExposedList <schema>::<exposure-list>

Delete ExternalComponentLibrary <schema>::<activeX-or-dotnet-library-name>

Delete [Jade]HTMLDocument <schema>::<html-document>

Rename [Jade]HTMLDocument <schema>::<html-document> <new-name>

Delete RelationalView <schema>::<relational-view-or-RPS-mappings-name>

Like the Rename Schema command, it would be useful if we also had support for the following rename commands, even though it doesn't appear possible via the IDE (these entities may be renamed via external source control repository) .

Rename Library <schema>::<library> <new-name>

Rename ExternalComponentLibrary <schema>::<activeX-or-dotnet-library-name> <new-name>

Rename RelationalView <schema>::<relational-view-or-RPS-mappings-name> <new-name>

Schema Evolution

For all commands, they should support both latest & current schema versions wherever possible (but we'll happily work with current schema version support initially).

Support for latest schema version is preferred so we can unversion a schema to rollback changes on error should we need to. With that in mind, validation for the deletion of entities in latest schema version should support/understand when we've just deleted a dependent entity rather than throwing an error because it still appears to be in use.

NOTE:

• I've not covered external databases or dynamic property clusters above, not things I've spent a lot time using, so need to familiarize myself with how they work before suggesting appropriate commands.

• I've dropped ad-hoc indexes from the initial list above, as I don't believe they're covered by standard schema extract & load functionality.
  

UPDATE (16/12/20):

I've crossed out the external component libraries above as I've since realized those commands are implied when deleting/renaming the primary proxy class created for those libraries. While the approach is somewhat clunky as you have to delete any sub-classes first, it does work, hence removed them from list above.