Introduction

Over a year ago we released Boardies MySQL Manager for Android. It was released as a Beta app, and it is still considered a Beta. For those of you are don't know, a beta app is an app, which is released to the general public, however, is still in active development, and is considered as an early release. This means that there will be bugs and features missing, and we are actively working on the app to add extra functionality and fix bugs.

What if I find a bug?

If you find a bug, first off, apologise, but this is all part of a beta release but we would be greatful if you could help us. If you do find a bug, or have a feature request, please don't give us a bad rating in the play store, apart from the fact that it gives others a bad representation of our app, but it also doesn't help us, as we still have no idea what the problem is therefore we can't fix it, which we really want to be able to do.

Therefore if you do find a bug, then please report it to our bug reporting service at http://www.boardiesitsolutions.com/bugs. When you report a bug, please provide us as much information as possible so that we can fix it as quickly as possible. Therefore, please provide us with at least the following details:

• What Android version you are using (Go to settings > About) and if you could let us know your Android device as well that would also help us.
• Your MySQL Server version and if possible, the Operating System that your MySQL Server is running on
• The steps to reproduce the bugs, (please provide as much information as possible here, the more info we have the more likely we can replicate the problem and fix the bug and release an update as quickly as possible.
• If the bug is related to perform a query, please let us know the query and the amount of data you are expecting to be returned, e.g. number of rows and the number of columns.

With any of the information you give us in the bug report, do not give us any confidential data.

If you are experiencing an error with regard to connecting to your server then below are a couple of tips to help, however, if they don't work, then if you could create us a test account that we can attempt to connect to your database that would be great, obviously don't give us access to your own database, if possible provide us a blank database with a test table that we can use.

If the error you are seeing is something like the following:

ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'user'@'li416-252.members.linode.com' (using password: YES)

If you are seeing this, it means that the user account that you are using to connect to the database isn't allowded to be connected to via a remote host. By default, a user is only allowed to connect to localhost so a permission will need to be added to allow remote connections.

Hopefully the play store makes this clear, but just to re-iterate, Android doesn't have any support for a direct MySQL Connection from Android, therefore, when you connect to your database from your android device, the app posts to our web server and its our web server that connects to your database, runs the query and returns the result back to Android. This is all done via an PHP API on our web server. To allow our web server to connect to your database, from your MySQL server run the following SQL statement:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'user'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'

Above is the easist way to get the connection working, however, not recommended as this will give the user user full acces to every database and every table on your server, e.g. they will be able to run SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, TRUNCATE etc. It also means that the user will be able to connect to the database from any remote host. If you wished, you could change the above so that only our web server can connect remotely and no one else. In order to do this run the following:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'user'@104.28.18.83' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'

What's next for Boardies MySQL Manager

Now on to the main reason for this post, hopefully the exciting part, what you can expect to see in the future for the app.

We have many things planned for the app, and we wanted to highlight some of them to you, to give you something to, hopefully, look forward to.

App Password/Pin Protection (Pro Feature)

This is going to be a pro feature, but it will help protect the your stored database connections, and therefore your database. If you purchase the IAP (In App Purchase) then you will get the option to either password or pin code protect the app (or of course don't enable the protection). You can decide when the app automatically locks, either immeidaly after the app has closed, or after a certain period of inactivity.

MySQL Auto Complete Suggestions

As you type your MySQL queries, the app will attempt to work out what might be the next part, whether its a MySQL Keyword, a column name, database name or table name and show you the possibilities that you can select and have it append to your SQL query. This should make your queries much easier and quicker to do

Save Query and ResultSet to File and ResultSet Export

There are two parts to this feature.

The first part, is saving an internal app file of the query and the result set. Then you will be able to open up the app and reload the file. When you reload the file, you'll then get the option to just load the result set from the file, or load the file and automatically re-execute the query to get an update version of the resulet set. You'll then have the option to update the file.

The second part will allow you to export your result set to a CSV file. The CSV file can then be opened in a compatible application such as a spreadsheet program.

Device Synchronisation (Pro Feature)

This is also going to be a pro feature. This feature, if enabled, will allow the app to automatically synchronise your stored connections to either your Google Drive or your Dropbox account. All of the details will be encrypted and when enabled on multiple devices, each device will automatically synchronise and download your stored connections on to each device.

Have your own feature request?

Do you have your own feature request, if so, we would love to hear it. You can either send us a tweet to @BoardITSolution or send us a message on Google plus at http://plus.google.com/+BoardiesITSolutions, or you can drop us an email at [email protected].