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“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” - Confucius
In many occasions the experience of using the graphical views is ... frustrating.
When trying to "simplify" the processes, they end up being complicated and it is difficult to understand how they work.
One of the DSP editors, the graphical views of Data Builder, is characterized by not having a button bar to select what we want to insert in the view (as they occur in the Data Flows editor), the idea of this editor is that we use the drag and drop and when the editor needs it, it will ask us what we want to do.
An example would be when dragging a table with another one, here it does not know if we want to make a join or a union and it asks us. The problem is that it doesn't always ask .... you drag an object over another one and it makes a join, you want to make a join union, but the editor doesn't ... and of course it wins.
I do not know when it asks you and when not, I suppose that there will be a reason but I do not know it (there are no messages or logs), and to have to go dragging and dropping in different places to see when it gives you the option, it is frustrating.
So you spend half an hour doing a view, trying to make a union and even if at the end you get it and you have 3 paths in your UNION, you are a bit upset.
But, wait, you realize that you have to make one more change, remove one of the paths, and NOW the adventure begins....
How to remove one of the paths?
One of the few buttons we have on the taskbar is the delete object button (we can also use the DELETE key), so select the initial object of the path and delete them, easy, right? No ...
Removing the path, destroys the union, the output, etc.
Ok, this is why the UNDO was invented.
Let's try deleting instead from the beginning, from the end, removing objects from the union to the origin. Yes!
Happy? no. I had to "fake" and shorten a lot all the steps and attempts I had to make, which were much more than 2, and in my real case there are many more objects in the view.
In some occasions, UNION was not destroyed, but its operation was altered leaving more than 100 output fields (it has 73), or it left less fields, without a clear apparent reason.
So I have not stopped doing "undo" and testing, "undo" and testing... until it worked, I'm not even convinced that the success is because I started deleting from the side near the union, because I had to alter the original view so much that I'm sure that all the previous changes also affect it.
Doing it in graphical view took me an hour to add a union and remove another one, in a select SQL view it would have been less than 10 minutes.
In theory the use of graphical views EASES maintenance, but this is only true when it comes to adding or removing a field, if you start changing JOINS and UNIONS, everything starts to get complicated, it removes or puts fields that you did not want or just takes away (in the case of Joins) the field that should not, because it does not understand the logical difference of an OUTER or INNER join.
And finally the maintenance is COMPLICATED.
Update: If in addition sometimes after opening a view, there are changes of difficult justification, such as formulas that are modified, without going any further today has changed a calculated field that had the formula
CAST( baseprice_value * quantity AS DECIMAL(18, 2))
to
baseprice_value * quantity [object Object]
giving its corresponding error in the view, and having to check things to see which was the original formula.
All these things make me less and less confident in graphical views, and my recommendation is not to use them
Yes, life may be simple, but we complicate it.
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