Graphical Query Builder for GSoc 2008 - Mailing list pgadmin-hackers

Hello everybody, my name is Christian Wong and I'm new in this list so this is my first post.

With this mail, I'd like to introduce you to my GSoC project [1] about a Graphical Query Builder for pgAdmin III, and I'd like go get your feedback, because at the end it could be a pgAdmin Community project. Please forgive me for writting too late.

I am a last year undergraduated student in Computer Science at the Universidad Nacional de San Agustin at Arequipa, PERU, I'm familiar with C, C++ and Java programming languages and some multiplatform GUI libraries as GTK, qt and currently I'm reviewing wxWidgets [2] for this project. I'm currently testing the pgAdmin source code with TortoiseSVN on Windows.

The goal of this project is to add a Graphical Query Builder (GQB) into the 'pgAdmin III Query window', properly speacking on the frmQuery form. I'd need to insert a 'wxNotebook' instead of the ctlSQLBox named sqlQuery and put this sql box into the wxNotebook as its first Page. The second page would have a wxShapeCanvas (it would be better implementet as a control in the ctl folder in order to follow the pgAdmin design idea). Another change to be done, would be the redesign of the toolbar object (wxToolBar) which could become a control because it will be different when editing a SQL Query or when editing a Graphic Query. I propose to implement the State design pattern [3] (behavioral Pattern) which will allow change the toolbar acording to the Page selected; it will be managed with the wxNotebook::OnSelChange event.

The canvas would have three kind of objects: Tables, Views and Subqueries. Some existing GQB doesn't support subqueries, I suggest the subqueries as the third object and it will be defined in other Page of the wxNotebook widget.

The GQB must support the definition objects alias, restrictions (where clause), nested restrictions, groups and sort orders. All of this definitions will be done on two new dialogs: Table and Column properties (about the graphic query, of course). Another feature could be the drag and drop option from the object tree view to the canvas.

As new in wxWidgets, I am reading about the drag and drop and the canvas usage.

I have some questions to ask you:
 + Which is the preferred OS?, could it be Freebsd or MS Windows?
 + I've read a similar post in 2006. Why the GQB is not implemented? Wasn't a successful idea for that year? why?
 + When is the best moment to start this project?

Well, thanks for your time; and I will continue improving and complementing the idea. Thanks again.


References:
 [1] The project is in my blog: http://christianwong.wordpress.com/category/gqb-for-pgadmin-iii/
 [2] Smart, J.; et al.; "wxWidgets 2.8.7: A portable C++ and Python GUI toolkit". November, 2007
 [3] Gamma, E.; Helm, R.; Johnson, R.; Vlissides, J.; "Design Patterns". Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.

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Christian J. Wong Cruz
Undergraduated Student in Computer Science (?)
Universidad Nacional de San Agustín