DataBasin 1.1 S released

DataBasin 1.1S and DataBasinKit have finally been released, after a long time-span.

This release is dedicated to my late friend and colleague Steven Rovelli (hence the "S" in the release name) who parted from us too young. He was an enthusiastic user of DataBasin and used and supported it inside our company, for countless AMS tasks. COVID-19 carried him away and he will be sorely missed.

This release is marks also the move from the GAP svn repository, to standalone projects on GitHub.

DataBasin sports some interesting news:

• Improved interface with ComboBoxes to select update/insert objects and preferences to filter out more system objects
• remember last successful login username
• getUpdated / getDeleted
• Undelete
• Improved support for sub-objects and lists and unpacking (from DataBasinKit), this allows for example to use sub-queries, provided the related object is one (LIMIT 1)
• support for enabling Assignment Rules in create/update

The core DataBasinKit has also many improvements,, some of them are not completely appreciated from the GUI interface, but useful for other programs wishing to use the API:

• enhanced and rewritten handling of sub-objects and object-lists in query results: this allows to have SObject lists interpreted as such when using subqueries.
• getUpdated and getDeleted
• undelete
• possiblity trigger Assignment Rules in create & update
  

DataBasin and DataBasinKit 0.9 released

After more than a year of work, finally a new release of DataBasin and its associated framework. This version features a Framework that can be used in threads and the application itself is capable of having concurrent connection classes to SalesForce.com.

On Windows

On OpenBSD

Countless bug fixes (thanks to the bug reports of my colleagues Diego, Moustapha, Matteo + Matteo).

Major new features are:

• threadable DataBasinKit framework
• concurrent, interruptible operations (e.g. select vs. update)
• handle multiple errors as a result of update
• filter new lines when writing CSVs
• countless bugfixes, especially in select-identify corner cases

DataBasinKit allows you native connection to SalesForce.com, allowing your application to integrate SOQL queries (SELECT, UPDATE similar operations), be it on Mac (Cocoa) or NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux or Solaris as well as Windows (MinGW).
DataBasin itself allows you to perform standard operations in a quick and agile interface: Extract accounts on Linux without the need of Java. Use the unique select-identify feature.

I am proud that Free Software can connect from a Free Software Operating System to a proprietary system and bridge the two worlds, enabling to do administrative work without being constrained to Java on Windows (read: DataLoader). Thanks to the many developers who continue supporting me in the development and keep these fine Operating Systems and tools alive.

DataBasin 0.7

DataBasin 0.7 is out!

If you need to query, update,  create data on SalesForce.com and are on a GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris system or MacOS-X... try it out! Do you need to perform a query having objects or IDs instead of a where clause? Select-identify will come handy for you.

Some of the news:

• Save results of update and create in a results.csv file with succeess and failure
• Progress monitor of operations shows time remaining 
• The login panel shows a visual icon if login happened successfully or not
• Progress monitor for Query, Delete, Insert
• Select identify now supports ORDER BY
• Internal core enhanced for Delete
• Many bug fixes and clean-ups

DataBasin development: logger and semi-joins

I am working on two long-needed features of DataBasin, the open source application to extract and inspect data from salesforce.com

The first feature is rather simple: a log window which shows some informative or debug output usually thrown to the console. While on standard Unix we always have the terminal emulator open and all debugging is very convenient there, on mac and especially on windows it is inconvenient: DataBasin logged every output as an Event in the windows log. Quite painful.

A much more complex, interesting and long awaited feature is that DataBasin now supports semi-joins! In other words, one can reference a field of a referenced object with the dot notation (like: Case.Account.Name) exactly as in the Salesforce.com Data Loader. The objects are recursively scanned and flattened so that they can be written to the CSV file. The column names are generated through the descent of the object tree.
This feature required a much more flexible approach in the CVS writer core. This means that some regression bugs could appear... hopefully not.

This feature applies to all queries, including the Select Identify query tool.

As the parser was being rewritten and the supported API bumped to 25, it is now improved to handle Aggregate Objects, thus one can now issue the following SOQL query:

select count(id), status from case group by status

and get the expected result:

"Status","expr0"
"New","16"
"Closed","31"

I hope these features make DataBasin much more useful!