This was actually a cool tip I saw internally from one of the product managers, when trying to find specific text in a migration.
I’ve been working with Flyway Desktop for work more and more as we transition from older SSMS plugins to the standalone tool. This series looks at some tips I’ve gotten along the way.
A Large Project
I’ve got a project in Flyway Desktop that I add to regularly. It doesn’t do anything amazing, but I keep slowly adding objects, with the idea that I want to build up a large project for showcasing different things to customers. You can look at the project here if you are interested.
In my list of migrations, I’ve got a number of migrations, 21 to this point. It is a little hard to read names here, but I’ve named each script to make searching easier. I’ve included a create or alter, a type, and an object name. This helps me use the search box at the top of FWD, which searches migration names.
Most of these are relatively small scripts, one or two objects. A few are a little larger. If I select a particular one (21 as shown below), the code scrolls off the screen. Even if I expand the code listing to take up the entire screen, I can’t see all the code.
More importantly, it can be hard to visually find something in the code. If you’ve ever edited a stored procedure of 100 or more lines, you know what I mean.
One of our PMs pointed out recently that you can use the standard browser CTRL+F if you’ve clicked into the script. I’ve done this below and the search widget pops up at the top of the code. I’ve entered part of an object name here, prod, and you can see this shows 6 matches.
The first one is highlighted in a pale yellow color in the code.
If I click the down (or up) arrows in the search widget, the code jumps around, as it would in a browser. You can see below I’ve jumped down to the 4th occurrence, with the 2nd and 3rd highlighted in an orange(ish) color, while the 4th also has the yellow background bar.
Many of us would perform work on this code in an IDE (SSMS, ADS, etc.), but while managing a project or perhaps evaluating something else, we might want to quickly find something in code in FWD. Perhaps reviewing a change I’m about to commit. USing CTRL+F might be a handy feature.
I do wish the search was more comprehensive at the top, and could dig through all the files in the project, but at least I can search within a file here. Having a good naming convention for migrations also helps me to find the high level purpose for a migration in the list.
Flyway Enterprise
Try Flyway Enterprise out today. If you haven’t worked with Flyway Desktop, download it today. There is a free version that organizes migrations and paid versions with many more features.
If you use Flyway Community, download Flyway Desktop and get a GUI for your migration scripts.
Video Walkthrough
I made a quick video showing this as well. You can watch it below, or check out all the Flyway videos I’ve added: