Table of Contents
Welcome to the FlameRobin Alpha test! We thank you for evaluating this software and encourage you to send comments, bug reports and feature requests back to us so we can make a better product. We remind you that this is Alpha quality software so you shouldn't expect it to work flawlessly. The purpose of this very early release is finding bugs and tune the user interface, for which we need feedback from the prospect users.
FlameRobin is a GUI administration and data manipulation tool for Firebird servers and databases. It is designed to be small, simple and cross-platform, yet offer all the basic features needed to administer Firebird servers and create/maintain databases. FlameRobin is Open Source software and binaries are currently available for Windows and several Linux flavours. Ports to other platforms are possible, subject to the availability of maintainers for those platforms.
Currently FlameRobin is not a full-featured administration tool, as there are plenty available for Firebird from several different parties. Our first goal with FlameRobin is to provide people not used to the command line with a GUI tool to get started with Firebird. Our longer-term goal is to develop a richer tool mainly for the Linux market; while there are several rich and mature GUI tools under Windows, some of them available for free or for a modest price, there isn't any for Linux. Another goal for the "lite" edition of FlameRobin is to be bundled with the Firebird server to serve as a starting kit for new users - this is subject to approval by the Firebird Project, which may have alternative tools at hand.
The home page of the FlameRobin project is located at http://www.flamerobin.org. The project itself is hosted on SourceForge. We have kept the Project's codename, "fbmanager", in some places. We will hopefully change it everywhere with time. Please use our mailing list (fbmanager-devel) to contact the developers. Details and archives available here. You are also encouraged to use our bugs and feature requests trackers to report back to us the results of your alpha testing. If you are a developer interested in joining the FlameRobin project, let us know. We are always looking for collaborators.
FlameRobin is released under the Initial Developer's Public License. You can find the complete license text in the file license.html, or here.
Please refer to changes.txt for a detailed history of all the changes since the previous alpha release.
If you want to build FlameRobin from sources, please find instructions on our web site or CVS. In this section we talk about installing the pre-built version of FlameRobin under all currently supported platforms.
To install FlameRobin under Windows you need to have the Firebird client (gds32.dll for Firebird 1.0, fbclient.dll for Firebird 1.5 and up) installed and available, then just run the automatic installer of FlameRobin which will copy all required files in a directory of your choice and optionally create desktop and start menu shortcuts. If you have installed a previous alpha version of FlameRobin, it is recommended that you remove it before installing this version. You might be able to keep your servers.xml and config.ini files, but at this early stage of development we cannot guarantee that.
Here are the files used by FlameRobin to store configuration information:
servers.xml is the list of Firebird servers and databases you work with; FlameRobin will create it (and automatically add the "localhost" server) when you run it for the first time; then you can register new servers and databases (see documentation).
config.ini stores FlameRobin's configuration information, like the position and size of the main program window. You don't need to edit it by hand except when wanting to turn on/off some special features (see documentation).
The name, structure and location of these files is going to change in a future release, certainly before release 1.0.
If you need to uninstall FlameRobin you can do so from the start menu icon (unless you told the installation program not to create one) or from the Control Panel.
Upon startup, FlameRobin will present a "Firebird Servers" tree containing only the local server (localhost). Here is a brief how-to for getting started with FlameRobin; please refer to the user manual for more detailed information.
At this early ALPHA stage the user manual is not yet provided.
You can add a server by righ-clicking in "Firebird Servers" and choosing "Register server...". You will have to specify the host name and the port number (default 3050) on which it listens. Once added a server, you can register databases under its node.
To access an existing database from FlameRobin you have to register it. Registration will make FlameRobin remember the database connection properties so you don't have to re-enter them every time. Locate the correct server in the tree, right click it and choose "Register existing database...". You will have to enter the database path (or alias name), the user name and password (note: the password is stored as plain text in servers.xml. For security reasons, we recommend you to NOT specify it in this dialog: FlameRobin will then prompt you for the password each time you connect to the database). You can also optionally specify a connection charset and role.
To create a new, empty database, locate the desired server in the tree, right click it and choose "Create new database...". You will then need to input the database file or alias name, the user name and password for the owner of the new database (use SYSDBA as the user name and masterkey if you don't know what to put in these fields), the character set, the role, the page size (the default value of 4096 is just fine) and the SQL dialect (leave it set at 3 if you don't know what a SQL dialect is). The new database will be created and registered (which means it is available in FlameRobin).
Just double click on the database name in the tree, or right click it and choose "Connect". Choose "Disconnect" to close the connection to the database.
Upon connection, the sub-tree under the database name is populated with a description of the database's structure (metadata). Browse the tree to explore the metadata.
You can view and/or change the properties of every object you see in the tree by choosing the "Properties..." option. Please note that currently not all object types are supported. Trying to show the property sheet for an object of an unsupported type will result in a blank sheet. The property sheet is a HTML page with a summary of the object's properties and links which open other pages or specific editors. Some of the options are not yet available, but you can f. ex. edit almost all aspects of the most common objects (tables, views, stored procedures, and so on). Please have a look at changes.txt to see what's new.
Although we try to test the features as much as we can, this is early ALPHA software and you should only use it to work on backup copies of your databases, or perform backup copies before using FlameRobin on them. Having said that, we have to add that many of us use FlameRobin in their everyday Firebird development without a problem.
After connecting to a database, locate a table, view or selectable stored procedure of your interest in the tree and right-click it. Choosing either "Select ... from ..." option will open the SQL editor with the table/view data shown in the lower grid. In the case of selectable stored procedures with parameters, just the select statement appears in the SQL editor, so you should fill the parameter values (if you have any) and click the Execute button to see the data.
Of course you can use the SQL editor window to execute arbitrary SQL statements. You can open a SQL editor window by right clicking on a database node and choosing "Run a query". The SQL editor tool offers script execution capabilities (including SET TERM support), load/save buttons, auto-completion features, commit/rollback, some execution statistics (including but not limited to the query PLAN), and a data export tool: to activate it, right click on the data grid. The data export tool is currently able to copy the data to the clipboard, generate SQL INSERT statements or export the data to a HTML file. All options work on the whole grid contents or just the selected parts. You can also multiple-select several different grid "islands" and have the tool export them.
You can perform a database backup by right clicking on a database and choosing "Backup database...". Choose "Restore database..." to restore a backup file over the current database (you will have to disconnect first). Note: it is usually considered bad practice to restore a backup file over an existing database. Future versions of FlameRobin will probably provide a way to restore under a different file name. For the time being, you can do that by registering a new (non existing) database in FlameRobin and restore over it. The Backup and Restore features work in background, so you are allowed to continue working with FlameRobin while they proceed.
This section documents the options you can set in FlameRobin's config.ini file. Currently there isn't a dialog box where you can set these options through a GUI, nor are they documented elsewhere.
Set this option to 1 to enable storing size and position of each window (frame) on closing. Set it to 0 to disable the feature.
The object properties frame's storage option can be further customized, see MetadataFrameStorageGranularity.
Set this option to 0 (sgFrame) to store a single set of values; this means that whenever an Object Properties dialog is opened it will have the position and size of the last Object Properties dialog used. Use 1 (sgObjectType) to store a set of values for each object type. This means that a Table Properties dialog will have different settings than a Trigger Properties dialog, but two Table Properties dialog will share the same set of values. Setting this option to 2 (sgObject) will make it so that every object's dialog will have a set of options of its own. This mode is the most flexible, but consumes more disk space and memory.