Rose is really wonderful so thanks to John Siracusa and supporters. I've written an application which will take any database (at least any of mine) and let you search on selected fields for all the "top-level tables" and then for any record view all the fields and fields in relationships recursively in an HTML browser.
Which is useful but only a step on my goal of enhancing this to enable all these fields to be editable as well. Which is a harder job and so this has made me wonder a few things: 1. Presently I just put write the html tags in my code and I'm very familiar with this. But was looking at Rose::HTML::Objects. Is the main benefit of this simply to avoid having to write lots of html tags in your code when writing html forms? Or does this also help me avoid worrying about field types. For instance, can I shove the metadata of a field into an HTML object somehow and then inside an HTML form, it will magically produce the correct input field. e.g. if it were an ENUM field, it would show a drop-down choice box and if it were a BLOB field, it would show a textbox instead of a normal one-line text field? If it's the former, then I may be best off sticking with what I do already. If it's the latter, well that would a great time-saver. 2. Does Rose::HTML::Objects assist me with assessing and checking and generally dealing with the incoming data from an HTML form? 3. This app I need to write seems to be such an obvious thing that I'm wondering if I am trying to reinvent the wheel. Does there already exist a Rosified version of an HTML front end for editing the data in any database generically? Also, I see there is an unreleased thing called Rose::WebApp - should I be waiting for that?? 4. Or does database data vary so widely that a truly generic app of this sort couldn't be written because one normally needs to taylor the html forms to a certain degree to allow for number, size and types of fields. I mean it seems to work for my databases but perhaps the output would be non-ideal for other peoples'. Questions for general discussion as well as for my own selfish purposes! thanks, James. Masters Traditional Games +44 (0)1727 855058 http://www.mastersgames.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Rose-db-object mailing list Rose-db-object@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rose-db-object
