GSoC 2010 Data Seeder - Project start off

I'm posting this to let you all know how my first week with the Melange community has been.

Bonding with the community has gone very smoothly, the community is very close together and I love the idea of having weekly conference calls. Sounds like a really fun summer ahead of me and I hope everybody will enjoy it.

The first thing I needed to do for my project was to really understand the data model behind Melange. Since there are quite a few entities involved and keeping in mind that models might perhaps change somewhere in the future, I thought the best way to accomplish this is to build an automated tool that draws diagrams from only the source code. There are two kinds of diagrams I wanted to have: inheritance diagram, showing how classes derive from each other and an entity relationship diagram, showing the relations between entities.

The code that I have produced is inspired from an open source project that does mostly the same thing for Django models. It is part of django-command-extensions.

I hope I can integrate my script with the Melange code base pretty soon, so that anyone can generate graphs from their own copy if anything has changed in the data model.

Here are my results so far:

Inheritance

Inheritance, separated by module

Entity relationship

Entity relationship, with attributes

Entity relationship, separated by module

Some conclusions:

Boy, are there a lot of relations out there!

Personally, I didn't expect to see that many relations between the models. This is definitely going to influence the way I'll design things around, especially the web interface, in order to make it as easy as possible to configure relations in the seeded data.

That's about it for this week, I'll now start actually doing those design documents! :)

Cheers,

sttwister (Felix Kerekes)