I am glad you like the capabilities of the XML data loading mechanism. 

We have invested a lot of effort in filling out our support for the entire data management "lifecycle". This includes the ability to easily dump/export records from any table (possibly filtered) as well as the ability to dump/export data from multiple (related) tables. These enhancements will be introduced in the YAB 1.5 release.

The underlying implementation creates a dynamic Progress ProDataSet and uses Progress to serialize the dataset to XML. Unfortunately the ability to define new datasets is not straightforward in older YAB releases and has not been documented.

Did you have a specific table/entity in mind?

1. Thanks for the very prompt reply and
2. my apologies for falling off the face of the earth ...

My request was more a one-of, so I don't have specific table/entity suggestions that would make sense for standard product.

But when I think of what we are doing (what drove my original question), it would be awesome if one could create custom installation packages - i.e. packages installed with "yab install <package>". That package could include code, system data (menus, labels, browses), application data (Gen Codes), etc.

Use case:

We are going through an upgrade and it's much nicer to deal with "all artifacts of a given functionality as a group" (i.e. vertically - here's the code, menu(s), data for "this functionality") vs horizontally - I need these menus (across all functionality) these gen codes (across ...).  This would be great post upgrade too and really facilitate the software migration process in controlled environments.

Anything like that possible now or planned for in the future?

One more note, my "kudos to the YAB team" was not just for XML data loading.  YAB is an incredible leap forward from mfgutil and QDT!  Well done and looking forward to where you take it.

Thanks,

Tim

We have introduced the "system-package-create" command in YAB 1.5 to create packages.

We also have worked on "content scanning" for packages, where artifacts (e.g. code/data/schema etc) in the right locations get bound to the correct steps in an environment update and this content scanning was further enhanced in YAB 1.6. The YAB 1.6 release will be generally available soon. The limitation at this point is that we do not have a public document for producing content for EE. We will be working on closing that documentation gap, but in the meantime we can provide guidance for setting up different packaging scenarios.

Will,
Awesome - I'm way behind ... YAB 1.3.  I have been relying upon notifications from the deployment team (emails from QAD Store) and the "recent files" tab on our download site.  I was unaware that YAB 1.4 was released let alone 1.5 ...
Downloaded QAD Enterprise Applications YAB 1.5 Configuration and Administration Guide and see "system-package-create".  Let me review and get YAB 1.5 ordered.

Had some other questions I was going to post, but you may have already solved some of those issues.

Thanks and be back soon.

Tim