SensorBase Blog

This is another one of those features people have been asking for a lot. The ability to specify whether or not a column within a table is to be UNIQUE or not. I have therefore implemented two functions to modify columns within a table to set and unset UNIQUEness for the specified column. If you want to set a column as UNIQUE, it must be the case that the existing rows not have any non-unique values for the column in question. Otherwise, I think it’s pretty straightforward. Let me know how it works out.
UNIQUE columns

I still have to work on updating this for the UI on the website, as well as displaying this information about columns in certain pages, but slogging now works according to how the column is specified. (If you try to add a row with a non-unique value for a UNIQUE column, you’ll get an error stating that you didn’t provide a unique value where required)

Adding on to the Inner Join SELECT query functionality, I’ve also included LEFT, RIGHT, and STRAIGHT types of joins for the query. There are still a few things you can’t do with these functions, but it’s all mentioned in the link: here. Anyways, hope these prove to be useful, let me know what other aspects of JOINS would be nice to have implemented.

Hey All,

So a real big thing people have been asking for is support for advanced query commands in sensorbase. The first of these has finally been implemented. Inner Join SELECT Queries in POST have been added and somewhat tested out (Inner Joins). As mentioned in the link, this requires that the user making the query have read access to both tables used in the join. Check back within the next few days to see when other types of joins get added to the feature list.

As always, let me know of any bugs or suggestions.

People have been saying that the update_row functionality in the POST section of functions is too difficult to use as it is. It was requested that a user be able to specify which rows to update by specifying column/value identifiers much like you would in a normal database query. I thought a user of the sensorbase API might not be completely familiar with database queries and might not know that multiple rows might be affected. Therefore, I thought I’d add another function to retrieve the SBIDs of rows within a table which have a specified column set to a specified value. Check it out here Let me know what you think, and if it’s helpful.

Some of you may have noticed that clicking on the “get data” button from the table view page in sensorbase resulted in not being able to retrieve your data. This bug was caused by the recent merging of code to the live version of the site. Thanks to Jason for pointing it out, after investigating the problem for a bit, it has now been fixed.

Let me know if there are any other problems! Thanks!

As usual, you can check out the updated POST functionality at HTTP POST and such.

The new additions from the last two days are these:

1) Update Table row through POST
Update a row that you have write access to.
2) View list of users with permissions for a project
You must have build access to use this command, but not necessarily be the owner.
3) View list of users with permissions for a table
Same requirements as 2)

So, those are the updates for this week, test them out, and let me know if you have problems with them. I tried them all out quite a bit and fixed initial problems, but I’m sure you might be able to find more.

Things to look for in the coming weeks include:
Improving stability and performance of Sensorbase
Implementing advanced sensorbase queries such as table joins.
Adding an Alerting Mechanism to Sensorbase for quality assurance and other event-based actions

Well, that’s all for now, let me hear some feedback.

Hey again,

So a few more features are on the list:

creating tables, viewing table and project structures are all functioning.
The official help page is updated to show currently supported features.

Check back there to see more added POST functions as they get added!