Omega.SDSClient now supports BLOB Entities

Today we released a new version of Omega.SDSClient. In this new version we have included support for BLOB entities. You can now create new BLOB entities, download & view BLOB content.

Screenshot below shows the new Entity Panel.

As you can see from picture above, there are now two icons: One to create Entity with Flexible properties (Flexible Entity) & other to create Entity with BLOB content (BLOB entity). Under the list of entities, we are now showing both the BLOB & Flexible entities. Just by looking at your entities list, there are 3 ways by which you can identify that one entity is a BLOB or Flexible entity:
1. There will be a "Star" icon in the entity display header.
2. You will see an icon to download/view in the entity display header.
3. For BLOB entities, kind will always be null (at least for now).

We have not changed the functionality of Flexible entities.

CREATE BLOB ENTITY

To create BLOB entity, click on the "New BLOB Entity" icon. Following form will be displayed:

Here are the steps to create a BLOB entity:

1. Specify an ID for the entity or you can click on "Auto Generate Id" button to let the application generate one for you. When the application generates one, the Id will be in the form of GUID.
2. Select a file. It can be any file. Currently through this application we are limiting a maximum of 10MB upload even though SDS supports each BLOB entity to be 100 MB in size. Application will show you the file size (in bytes) of the file being uploaded.
3. Based on the file type (basically extension), we set the content type of the file. However you are free to change the content type. We have mapped common extensions to their mime types (e.g. gif files to image/gif etc.). Since we possibly can't map all kinds of file types, for those we have not mapped the content type will be application/octet-stream.
4. Click on the "Save" button.
   

UPDATE BLOB ENTITY

Steps to update a BLOB entity are exactly same. Only difference being you can't edit the Id field.

DOWNLOAD/VIEW BLOB ENTITY

Viewing a BLOB entity is a two step process: First we download then Blob contents and then save it on the web server. Once the contents are saved on the web server, you can view the contents of the Blob Entity. To download / View Blob entity, click on the download/view icon. Following form will be displayed.

First click on the "Download" button to initiate download. Once the download is complete, "View" button will be enabled.

Click on the "View" button to view content.

Announcing the launch of Omega.SDSClient

Yesterday we launched our second product, Omega.SDSClient – a browser based client for Microsoft SQL Data Service (part of Azure platform). I will not go into the details of SDS & Azure platform as there is plenty of information available and I am certainly not the most qualified to comment on these. I would rather talk about the product itself. It certainly had been an interesting experience while development of this product. I would like to share those here:

• Omega.SDSClient is developed using Microsoft Silverlight & Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) technology. This was our first attempt at both of these technologies and I believe we have done a decent job at that. Essentially the team started with no knowledge on these two platforms and learned stuff as we were building this application.
  
• Omega.SDSClient is developed completely by my team here in India and I think they have done a remarkable job considering their overall and lack of prior experience with the technology used to build this product.
  

Coming back to Omega.SDSClient, here is our basic premise about building this as a web based product: If your data is stored in cloud, why do you need to download/install any software to manage it? So it is a web based application built on Silverlight 2 and WCF and it lets you do the following with your SDS data repositories:

• Manage Authorities
  
• Manage Containers
  
• Manage Entities
  

This is obviously the first version of the application and we hope to add more features to it. Currently we are planning to provide BLOB & Querying support in this product. Hopefully we should be out with our next version soon.

Please do check it out. The URL is http://omega.cerebrata.com/default.aspx?r=BLSP.

Drop me a line with your feedback.

I will keep you posted on the progress of the same.

Cheers!!!