Re: Data Entry Tool for PostgreSQL

On 23.09.2005 07:21, Ian Overton wrote:

or commercial data management tools out there, not database management tools like pgAdmin.

If you are after something commercial, we develop such things. Our
solution /can/ be made to work in any mozilla based browser, but most
customers prefer the stand alone version which comes with a nice native
installer for all platforms. Our applications are based on XUL, XBL and
the mozilla framework and provide much more comfort than HTML based
tools, such as drag and drop and all the other things you expect from
native client applications. A few screen shots how it looks for one
customer can be found here:

http://hannes.imos.net/xuladmin/1.png
http://hannes.imos.net/xuladmin/2.png
http://hannes.imos.net/xuladmin/3.png
http://hannes.imos.net/xuladmin/4.png
http://hannes.imos.net/xuladmin/6.png

Of course everything is multilingual and unicode based.

--
Regards,
Hannes Dorbath

We have a web application using PHP, Linux and PostgreSQL. We need a
simple data entry tool to allow non-IT people to edit data in our database
through a web-browser. Are there any free or commercial data management
tools out there, not database management tools like pgAdmin.

I have been working on a general purpose table-driven web-based database
query/update tool that I hope to release into the open source community
some day. (I've been calling it PostBrowse, as far as I can tell nobody
else is using that name yet.)

It doesn't handle every data type in postgres, but it'll handle most of
them, including limited support for arrays, and it will also support
having data in the form of radio boxes, check boxes and pulldown lists.
(It doesn't support style sheets yet, but I'm thinking about ways to add that.)

It's been in use at a client's office since March of 2004, so it's pretty
robust, though it needs some major cleanup work and doesn't have a lot
of documentation yet.

Contact me about your specific needs, if you're willing to be a pre-beta
tester, I may be able to put something together for you.
--
Mike Nolan
Tailored Software Service, Inc.
nolan@tssi.com

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, Ian Overton wrote:

Hello,

We have a web application using PHP, Linux and PostgreSQL. We need a
simple data entry tool to allow non-IT people to edit data in our database
through a web-browser. Are there any free or commercial data management
tools out there, not database management tools like pgAdmin.

I would have thought a php appliction would be able to this fairly
easily. My data entry scripts insert the new records with just a primary
key, then iterate through the various fields using an update sql for each
one which is not null.

This sort of approach coul easily be used to populate an on-screen table
using php, then update any changed fields as required.

Cheers,

Brent Wood

k

On 9/25/05 8:49 PM, "Brent Wood" <b.wood@niwa.co.nz> wrote:

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, Ian Overton wrote:

Hello,

We have a web application using PHP, Linux and PostgreSQL. We need a
simple data entry tool to allow non-IT people to edit data in our database
through a web-browser. Are there any free or commercial data management
tools out there, not database management tools like pgAdmin.

I would have thought a php appliction would be able to this fairly
easily. My data entry scripts insert the new records with just a primary
key, then iterate through the various fields using an update sql for each
one which is not null.

This sort of approach coul easily be used to populate an on-screen table
using php, then update any changed fields as required.

These types of applications are typically called "CRUD" applications
(Create, Read, Update, and Delete). Perl, Ruby, and Java, at least, have
frameworks for building CRUD applications in a fairly straightforward
(depending on needs and customization).

Sean

On Sep 26, 2005, at 11:45 AM, Sean Davis wrote:

These types of applications are typically called "CRUD" applications
(Create, Read, Update, and Delete). Perl, Ruby, and Java, at
least, have
frameworks for building CRUD applications in a fairly straightforward
(depending on needs and customization).

Cake looks like an interesting CRUD framework if you are using PHP:

https://trac.cakephp.org/wiki

John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL

I would have thought a php appliction would be able to this fairly
easily. My data entry scripts insert the new records with just a primary
key, then iterate through the various fields using an update sql for each
one which is not null.

A generalized program to do this for (nearly) any table is not a trivial
task. For a start you have to deal with knowing the difference between
an insert and an update, perhaps provide some kind of record-locking
scheme so it works in multi-user mode, do something about record keys
(whether using OIDs or some other unique single field), and deal with
quotes and other characters that cause problems for either web pages
or SQL statements.

Things like supporting a variety of search features, data type checking
(eg, making sure that a date or an integer is valid BEFORE trying an
insert/update), lookups on related data (for example, displaying the name
from a customer record when the ID appears in an order record), user
passwords, data access security levels, data formatting, etc. all add
complexity.

The main program I've been working on for about two years now is nearly
3200 lines long at this point. It has about 95% of the items on my
original wish list of features. It's been in use at a client's office
since March of 2004 and is used to maintain their database of over 600,000
members, among other things.

Could I write separate PHP programs to handle each table? Yes, and in
fact I've been doing that where I've needed to.

But I can build a full-featured query tool (with search, insert, update
and delete capabilities) for a new table in under 20 minutes, and it will
have the same look and feel as a couple dozen other programs for other
tables. That's saved me a BUNCH of time both in development and in training.
--
Mike Nolan