Friday, January 09, 2004

Emacs, DBVisualizer, and Java Within the last six months, I've started using DBVisualizer (http://www.minq.se/products/dbvis/) for accessing databases while I'm coding.  It's a great front end for any relational database that has a JDBC driver.  I highly recommend it. One of the many cool features is that result sets in the product are displayed in a grid (JTable).  You can select values in the grid and copy them to the clipboard to paste in other applications.  I frequently paste the data into Emacs for use in Java unit tests. The problem is that the columns of text are not in an array format.  So, I wrote the following Emacs functions to "fix the data up".  After you paste the data into Emacs you can immediately run one of the interactive fix-up functions.  (One of the thousands of beautiful things about Emacs is that it automatically sets the region around the pasted text.)  This will remove the column header and produce a comma delimited list of terms suitable for use in an array. (defun fixup-dbviz-array (start end replace-string) "Formats the region for use as an array and replaces the regexp match with the specified replacement string."   (unwind-protect       (progn         (narrow-to-region start end)         (goto-char (point-min))         (kill-line 't)         (while (re-search-forward "\\(.*?\\)\n" nil t)           (replace-match replace-string))                            (if (re-search-backward "," nil t)             (delete-char 1)))                      (widen))) (defun fixup-dbviz-string-array (start end) "Formats a column of values that are copy and pasted from DB Visualizer and formats them for use as a String array"   (interactive "r")     (fixup-dbviz-array start end "\"\1", ")) (defun fixup-dbviz-int-array (start end) "Formats a column of values that are copy and pasted from DB Visualizer and formats them for use as a int array"   (interactive "r")   (fixup-dbviz-array start end "\\1, ")) 12:38:09 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Tom Pierce.