Valentina 2.0. -- What is your 3 DREAM features?

[Robert Brenstein]

>
>And we are interested to get list of your DREAM features for database in a
>your favor IDE.
>
>Please send such feature list directly to me or to Valentina list.
>
>Please send ANY your dream, never mind how fantastic it sounds.
>Okay? :-)

Nothing too fantastic for me but here are a few things in a somewhat 
random order:

-- be able to query ANY parameters/options that are settable by us or 
by kernel, including things like file mode, file block size, mac file 
type/create, file extensions.
-- add call to check db file version without opening it
-- be able to store single global/persistent values easily (using 
system tables instead of having to maintain my own bo)
-- add SQLSelectField and SQLSelectGlobal
-- automatic diagnose when opening database which was not properly 
closed (like in a crash)
-- be able to run diagnose within my program and get diagnose reports 
directly into my program
-- sub-cursors -- searching an existing cursor
-- have proper support for character encoding and languages of 
text/string fields, allowing us to control both parameters 
independently (yes, I know this is promised)
-- ability to get progress feedback on time consuming tasks
-- option to have automatic time stamping of all or specific fields 
in a baseobject (updated only when content changes)
-- does valentina automatically zeros out space that becomes empty 
when existing data is encrypted? if not it should. And add an option 
for doing this upon any record deletion (a new call or an option for 
delete/all/Record/s)
-- easier way to control case-sensitivity of sorts/searches
-- built in options to compress large data upon storage and auto 
decompress upon recall (choice of compression)
-- simplify opening/creating encrypted database: New + 
Set(Structure)Encryption + Open --> CreateEncrypted and 
Set(Structure)Encryption + Open --> OpenEncrypted with Open returning 
an error dbEncrypted when trying to open an encrypted db. Also 
IsStructureEncrypted(fpath), IsDatabaseEncrypted(fpath) to check what 
kind of db we have (this was discussed on the list last year)
-- allow to specify file types/extensions in open() (cf. my post from 
2003/01/20)
-- implement auto timeout of cursors
-- option to open databases in read-only mode (as parameter to open 
or separate call) regardless whether it is on read-only or read-write 
medium
-- valentinaInit returns the size of actually allocated cache
-- allow to specify a limit on a number of returned records from sql 
query (top n, bottom n) as well as an option to specify the range of 
returned records (from/to)
-- provide similar set of examples for all environments as well as 
examples of functionality that are specific to a given environment
-- stop doing automatic file format conversions on open without our 
consent -- open() can return error "fileInOlderFormat" or 
"fileInNewerFormat" and if we want to convert then we use 
openConverting() or with an extra parameter for Open
-- use opportunity to clean up function/param names in BO-APIs
-- properly maintain FAQs
-- improve documentation

Robert Brenstein