I love Cuba but it really frustrates me :)

[easyviber4456 (Igor Novosel)]

I love Cuba but it really frustrates me

When you start and try basic examples and tutorials you get excited and everything seems like a smooth ride, but as soon as you try to do something not so common you get into the uncharted waters. I got stuck few times at things that, to naive me, seemed basic and logical. So I had to dig through documentation, get frustrated, sleep it over, start to doubt my intelligence, decided to redo everything using Django, got back, found more brilliant (but not enough documented) features of Cuba, got some progress, got stuck again…
Cuba has the potential to become a brilliant platform for users that are not very experienced in programming because it is easy to create basic app structure and functionality, but too often you have to “dig under the hood” to do some basic stuff, usually using Java, and I’m not very fond of Java.

Documentation is helpful sometimes, but sometimes it makes you even more confused so you don’t even know where or in what file should you add or change something, or where that file should be located, should you generate it or should it already exist…
An example of not very useful documentation is

TreeTable

• the documentation says you have to set

hierarchicalDatasource

and

hierarchyProperty

. OK, you click hierarchicalDatasource link in the documentation and you get one sentence about it - that it “is a subtype of CollectionDatasource”. Thanks, that really helped. Not. Info about hierarchyProperty is even harder to find.
At the end, I’ve decided not to use TreeTables, GroupTables or Tree because it’s just too confusing to get them working the way I wanted and expected them to work, and documentation is not very helpful.
Polymer support is also a great feature that is not well documented.
Sample projects are good and they were my main source for learning Cuba.

I would really like if Cuba could borrow some features from Filemaker Pro. Filemaker has a nice option for basic and not so basic calculations (I’ve attached a screenshot from FM): With a list of database tables and clickable fields in the left column (they get copied to current calculation formula after clicking) and with query and calculation options in the right column. Easy and fast, without need for IDE, importing dependencies and setting boring Java stuff

Another nice Filemaker feature that I find very useful is the ability to configure Auto-Enter settings. So entity attributes could automatically generate serial numbers or enter preconfigured values, dates etc… I know you can do this in Cuba with some code, but this seems much easier.

I will start new forum topics with questions about some of the issues I had so far so get ready to help me with them
I must compliment community for being active and helpful here in this forum.

[krivopustov (Konstantin Krivopustov)]

Hi Igor,

Thank you for your honest feedback. I understand you very well, especially with regards to the quality of documentation. Some of its parts were written quite a long ago and from a standpoint which is not relevant nowadays when we have powerful Studio and stable project structure. So we are going to rework these parts in the near future, probably HierarchicalDatasource will be one of the first items on our list Also, would be great if you could point out other obscure things from your point of view.

[thennu (Thenn Arasu)]

I m still at the baby steps in learing cuba but i can tell you one thing… no platform is going to satisfy all the business needs. You need to stick to a platform and get a working solution within the framework… Reinventing wheel will never be easier with any framework… There are nice to have features that could be done in near future. . Like for ex: datetime attribute can have seconds in it including picker which currently is a free text field for time with no seconds…But cuba is going in the right direction…