An hour ago I created a new release of Magic Cloud. This is a humungously large and important release, with hundreds of stabilising fixes and features. However, its primary feature that I suspect a lot of my regular readers will love, is that Magic now automatically wires up foreign keys for you. This implies that if one of your tables have a foreign key pointing into another table, it will display one string field from the other table, instead of just some dumb guid or auto incremented integer value. To understand the feature, take a look at the following screenshot.
The "film_actor" table from Oracle's Sakila database is a many to many link table between an actor and a film. Such many to many table allows you to populate a film with as many actors as you wish. In previous releases of Magic, the above "film_id" was simply displayed as an integer value. Displaying such foreign keys as their integer or guid value is of course meaningless, and this required manual work after the CRUD generator had done its job in order to get things right and useful. Typically this also required a lot of manual work unfortunately. In this release Magic Cloud will read your foreign keys as it generates your backend, and allow you to declare which lookup field you want to use in the foreign table to display such fields. To understand look at the following screenshot that is taken from the CRUD generator in the Magic Dashboard.