Behind the scenes
From GTwM
This section describes some of the ways AgileBase helps make life easier for database application developers
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Field options
agileBase provides a level of functionality above the basic database features to enforce various data characteristics, for example the case of text entered into a field.
View refactoring
When you alter a report, e.g. add or remove a column, any dependent views are automatically dropped and recreated, unless there is a dependency stopping this, in which case an error message will be displayed. This means that complex series of interdependent reports can be built a lot more easily than by manual database editing.
Catch division by zero errors
In PostgreSQL, a division by zero error caused by a calculation in any one of a report's rows will cause the whole report to fail.
agileBase catches these and returns null (an empty value) instead, so you can still see the rest of the data and find the exact lines which are failing (if you need to).
The application tries to catch other potential failures too - if you add or edit a calculation which would cause an error, the action fails telling you why.
Logging
All user actions are logged, for audit trail purposes. Administrators can visualise and view statistics in many ways
Automatic metadata
Last edit time, creation time and various other metadata are logged against each record, and this data is available for use in reports so you can e.g. filter for all edits made by a particular user, or sort records by creation time.
Database object commenting
Database tables, reports and fields are given unique non human friendly names so they don't have to change, however they are automatically commented in a human friendly fashion. Comments can be seen in psql using \d+ for example or in a tool such as PGAdmin
