Metastorage

This release introduces the capability of
generating a new type of function to create a copy
of an existing persistent object in memory. The
generation of form processing classes for creating
new objects was enhanced to support classes with
variables of types boolean, integer, decimal, and
float. This release also includes several minor
bugfixes.

This release introduces the possibility to group
rows of report query results, similar to using the
SQL GROUP BY clause. The Object Query Language was
enhanced to support constant expressions relative
to the current date and time of when the queries
are executed. The algorithm of computing the path
of parsed XML files was changed to avoid exceeding
the length of Windows file systems path limits.
The reports now support columns with boolean type
expression values.

This released introduces several fixes in the generated PHP code to make it compliant with the backward incompatible changes in PHP 4.4. Defining all persistent object classes in separate files referenced with the includedclass tag is now allowed. The list of tables in SQL queries of OQL expressions with not in operators was corrected. The encoding of 8-bit characters used in definition files was fixed.

This release introduces two new operators of the Object Query Language: in and not in. These operators can be used to define search conditions to check whether an object is present or absent in a one-many or many-many relationship with another object. A new tool named XMI to Metastorage was contributed, which can convert UML class diagrams exported by UML tools in the XMI format into Metastorage class component definition format (CPML).

This release includes an example application that demonstrates how to use Metastorage generated code in real projects. The example application is a simple news publishing system named Metanews. The documentation was enhanced to explain how Metanews was built using a methodology named Use Case mapping. This methodology defines how to depart from UML use case diagrams to an implementation based on PHP OOP classes. The templates of the form themes were enhanced to be compliant with HTML 4.01 Strict DTD. A bug in the generation of queries that use OQL to traverse collections of objects was fixed.