Suggestion: Validation between class fields and table columns

[petercranston]

Motivation

I recently came across a site where previous developers had added new columns directly to the database, without going through the recommended process of adding them as a field on a kentico class. I wanted an easy way to validate all kentico classes against the database to see how widespread the problem was.

Proposed solution

A new module to lookup the fields for each class (parsing the ClassXmlSchema) and comparing that with the columns in the database. I've developed a proof of concept module to do this which I can create a pull request for.

[ChristopherJennings]

Hi Peter,

This sounds like a really excellent module. What is the state of your proof of concept? If it's not ready for a full PR yet, would you mind linking to it here so we can take a look and provide some feedback? Did you have any questions we can help with to get this ready for a PR?

[petercranston]

Hi Christopher,
I've tested it on the Kentico 10 site that I mention above and it works well for that. I haven't checked it against other versions of kentico, and I haven't yet implemented any error handling. The link to my forked repo is here.

[ChristopherJennings]

Hi @petercranston, thanks for your patience on this.

Could you submit a draft PR for this per this new GH feature?

[ChristopherJennings]

Also, I've just taken a quick look at this and at first blush it looks good. I did notice that in my clean 11 instance table name case is giving some false negatives. So, one thing that could be improved is to make table names case-insensitive like you did for column names. My other testing showed exactly what I expected though (column in class, but not DB; column in DB, but not class; and field type "not represented in database" not being returned in report)

I think you're probably safe to go straight to a normal PR if you add the table name case insensitivity.

Thanks for the excellent work!

[petercranston]

@ChristopherJennings I've made the updates as suggested. Thanks!

[ChristopherJennings]

Thanks for the PR! I've pulled the changes into master and it'll be included in the next release. I'm currently waiting on one more PR that's nearly done before I issue a new release, but it should be soon.