Codebar: Instant Access to Generated Code

What is Codebar?

Codebar is an "always on top" toolbar designed to give you quick access to code that was generated by QCGU, in particular the customized PL/SQL code library generated by QCGU Quick Start.

Codebar is designed to fit comfortably and unobtrusively within your favorite IDE.  In the following screenshot, for example, I have positioned Codebar within the toolbar section of Toad^*:

 

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Example 1

Let's take a look at how you can use Codebar to accelerate your development and improve code quality.  Suppose I am building code around the EMPLOYEE table.  Specifically, I need to write a procedure to update the salaries of all employees in a given department.

First, I will click into the Object Selector, find EMPLOYEE and make that the current object:

Next, I need to write a parameter list that passes in the department ID and salary.  So I click on the Filter icon and type "in parameter" to help me quickly identify relevant code.

I then click into the Script Selector field and drill down to a script that looks just right:

As soon as select it, the Preview and Copy icons light up.  Since this is the first time I have used this script, I will click on it to preview the content.

That code looks good, so I click on Copy, click into my edit window and paste in the contents.  I then trim the code down to what I need: two parameters declared with anchored datatypes.  So I have followed best practices without paying the price of extra typing!

 

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Example 2

Now let's do something more substantial.  I need to find all the employees in the specified department and update their salary.  Department ID is a foreign key on the table.  So I will set the filter in Codebar to "foreign" and then see what scripts are available for that keyword.  I am also going to be querying lots of data, so I figure it would be good to take advantage of BULK COLLECT. This one looks promising:

I can read the description by clicking on the "open book" icon:

I like what I read, so I click on the copy icon, move my cursor into my edit window, and Control-V to paste in the contents.

With those few, quick steps and clicks, I now have a substantial body of non-trivial code with which to work: my query not only uses BULK COLLECT, but also fetches with the LIMIT clause and correctly checks the COUNT of the collection to determine if I have fetched the last of the rows in this result set.

 

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Your savings

This one script alone can easily save you a half hour of typing and debugging.  You can be confident that the generated code is both correct and implements best-practices.

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^*Toad is a registered trademark of Quest Software