Hi guys, Thank you Emil, Rick and Colin.
*Emil:* > I didn't exactly get your question. Are you looking for a way to search > for the records ? If the number of rows is huge and you need full text > search, you may need to look at Solr or Sphinx or AWS CloudSearch for fast > queries. If time is not a big concern, you may even be able to do away with > simple ActiveRecord queries (do look at squeel gem too : > https://github.com/ernie/squeel ). Yes, part of it is looking for a way to search for the records. And yes, number of rows is huge. There are around 80,000 rows split in multiple Excel sheets. I am thinking I may have to split this one database table into more tables that can help with the search. *Rick:* > Assuming you have little Ruby experience and no Rails experience I think > your best plan would be to familiarize yourself with RubyOnRails tutorials > at: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html (a full tree > provided by the RoR development group covering major Rails components), > and: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book (a very > good book by Michael Hartl with the apt sub-title "Learn Web Development > with Rails"). Both are free online. > I finished the first chapter of Rails Tutorial, and I have this https://github.com/arslanfarooq/first_app and http://fast-beyond-5656.herokuapp.com/ This was really fun and I believe when I finish this whole tutorial I'll learn a lot. But I have a 2 week deadline (actually I set the duration myself when they asked me how long will it take). So today I decided to first make this in PHP. Once this app is finished and tested in PHP, then I'll come back to making it in Rails. > Your application looks like a good one for a first effort with two models: > User and Item. Members of the User class can have roles associated with > them, i.e.: Manager, Employee, and Administrator. The Item class will be a > direct map of the spreadsheet, members will have fields that mirror the > spreadsheet columns. The Item search can be nicely built into the item > controller's index method and the item edit restriction can be enforced by > keying off the user's role in the controller methods and views. > What you are saying is kind of making sense, and I feel this may serve like a rough plan for what I want to achieve. Thank you! > I would suggest that, at least initially, you use a snapshot of the > company's spreadsheet to populate a database that you will use for all > development, test, and functional acceptance. I actually did this today in PHP, I imported the Excel data in the database. And the search form is working... kind of. It is pulling the results, but I need to grab a relational database book and look for ways to optimize my search query. I have decided to make two search forms. One search form to search using details of a product, and another form to search using details of a person. My SQL knowledge is very basic, and to give a clear idea of my skill level, I am a WordPress developer. So when I said I *know* how to make this in PHP and MySQL; I should have said I have an *idea* how to make this in PHP and MySQL. Right now I need to formulate a smart query when search form is submitted. My current query is too simple and does not give the desired results in many cases. Gives desired results in one particular way :) Which sucks. > You can then segregate out a separate task to either provide functions to > import and export the excel based data. I would suggest that the final > design might want to have the data held in a database with a publish > capability with an excel format (and/or pdf, and/or ...) that has the > published date/time as part of the page header. > Client did say to implement the print search results feature. So I'll use the pdf option. > Be sure to learn how to test your app, validate your data, and have fun. Thank you Rick! *Colin:* > +1 to those suggestions. To start developing an app before working > right through a good rails tutorial will just result in wasting a lot > of time. Yes I completely agree. > The railstutorial.org example will give you some useful > stuff such as user authentication that you can use in your app I will definitely finish that tutorial once this app is done in PHP. And for that, I just need to get the search to work nicely. I already implemented Twitter Bootstrap for PHP version so interface is already good and responsive. Thank you guys for your help and input. God bless you all. I don't want to ask for the SQL here. I'll use appropriate forums etc. -- arslan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rubyonrails-talk/172c5cd1-f9e6-46b0-ad18-b210c1e6d7f0%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
