Thread: Data Entry Tool for PostgreSQL
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. Regards, Ian.
On 23.09.2005 07:21, Ian Overton wrote: > 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. There is phppgadmin which you can modify / simplify for your users. I don't understand your problem if your app is PHP already. Just invest 2 more hours of development and create what you are asking for. -- Regards, Hannes Dorbath
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