[thelist] Form Generation
Steve Lewis
nepolon at worlddomination.net
Wed Jan 28 14:45:01 CST 2004
Manuel González Noriega wrote:
> He's looking for a script that will automagically generate the webforms
> to interact (insert/update/delete) with a given database,
>
> Such beasts exist, at http://dadabik.org lives one of them and iirc
> other similar solutions were offered
>
> Or were you just kidding? :)
Not really kidding. This is the myVisualWebApp idea I was thinking of.
The web app developer in a box comment was tongue in cheek. :) I
didn't know what current implementations looked like or were capable of.
dadabik isn't terribly impressive from a first pass through the docs
but there is likely more to it than I have grokked.
Feingold Josh S wrote:
> Steve, let me clarify. I am looking for something like
phpmyedit.org. > If people have not yet used this they are wasting a
lot of time... It > is not bad, but the problem is that if you want to
make tweaks after
> it runs there is no way to save them as you make changes to the
> database.
I cannot help but equate this to Dreamweaver vs hand-coding wrt the
quality/flexibility of the resulting system. I am always leary of
auto-generated code. The only way I feel comfortable using
auto-generated code is when it dumps out something I can then edit by
hand or augment with my own overriding code.
I would initially doubt I am "wasting" that much time having not used
one of these systems in the past, but I say that without having looked
at these systems in detail before. If they can represent highly complex
relationships than I probably am missing out. I have not been
festidious about finding and reusing available code--a bad habit of mine
which is why I asked for clarification.
I don't frequently build simple web forms. The last time I did any
related work, I was building a non-directional circular graph (not a bar
graph kind of graph, think a network topology map) using data from 5 db
tables. I used a depth-first-search recursion algorithm to represent
the data.
Of course there were 4 data-entry forms used to collect the data for the
db 7 tables, but I wrote my own configuration schema to configure the
generation of the HTML form and perform input validation. I had to write
some of the SQL portions custom to handle special dependancies while
others were driven off the schema. I did create the DB tables and
fields by hand but that doesn't take long--10 minutes? Having the DB
field-maintenance occur separately seems to have afforded me some
freedom to change things "on the fly" which may be more valuable in the
long run.
Hmm, guess I home-brewed my own myVisualwebApp tools, except that I have
to write the configuration file by hand. Now if I plug in an XML
parsing lib to read the config file, write the Schema file for the
config format, and build an HTML form->XML config bridge I can publish
my own myVisualWebApp. :)
cheers,
Steve
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