For several months now I’ve been using eSense Visualizers for Microsoft Sharepoint to output the contents of a database in a meaningful and easy to understand view that is suitable for the client, although lately I’ve not been using it as much.  Just this morning I’ve had to use it for a few hours again and I’m quickly remembering why I don’t like it and I have several issues that bug me (and I’m hoping it’s not just me).  These include:-

• When copying a query into eSense Visualizers (from notepad or Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio) it puts strange characters into the editor window which do not seem to cause any problems with the query running but does result in error message dialog boxes each time you go to the query editor.  The only way I’ve solved this so far is to save the query as a view or stored procedure and call that from eSense Visualizers.
• Formatting can take ages to apply and can be lost if the query changes even slightly and although it is a little more stable when you use stored procedures but it can still be a royal pain.  As the project progressed some of the stored procedure names are not accurate now but I’m extremely hesistant to rename then as I’m pretty sure I’ll have to re-do the formatting for a large proportion of the entities I have created.
• There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to copy a entity and I’ve spend hours creating entities and formatting them when I could have been done in around 30 minutes if I could simply have copied the entity and changed a parameter value.
• When updating a query the data on the screen does not always refresh right away and I have to edit the web part and click “Apply” before it will show the updated results.  I can understand that the caching is to try and avoid too many of the same queries being sent to the database, however, I can loose a good bit of time because I have to go through this process each time I update the query for entity and on a server that has decided it’s time for a go-slow… it’s not too good!

I don’t know if these are in to be addressed in future releases (or if there is currently configuration option I don’t know about) but I hope so as it would certainly make my life a good bit easier.