[JaxPM] Yo !

[J Proctor]

On the jacksonville-pm-list; Jax.PM'er J Proctor <jproctor at marlboro.edu> wrote -



> Which platform was it developed on?

Perl 5.8 and MySQL on Irix.


> Is it similar to Alzabo ?
>
> http://www.alzabo.org/

Damn.  Knew I should've gone to YAPC this year even though I was
unemployed.  That's what credit cards are for.

There's a great deal of intersection, but I'm not sure Alzabo solves
exactly the same set of problems.

I'm developing an rdb structure with a couple dozen tables (so far), and a
need to do CGI-driven show table/show record detail/add record/edit record
operations on a handful of them.  All of those operations require joins,
though, and the various detail pages sometimes require joins through a
cross-reference table instead of a simple foreign key.

So I started modeling the db structure, and including in the model
information about the 'views' I expect for each table, which columns to
show, in which order, and with what formatting.  My "show table" script
just gets the name of the table as an argument (for example,
"show.cgi?table=plasmids") and it calls the table-generator method on the
control object with that as an argument.  This method (via many private
methods it calls) generates the SQL, executes it, applies any special
formatting, and spits out a complete HTML table for me.

Or, it will, when I'm done rearranging it.  I had it working yesterday,
then started trying to clean up hash key names (I had some weird artifacts
from simpler versions) and tackle the representation of a complex output
format (bibliography entry) without, if possible, dragging printf-style
format strings into it.  I don't think I'm going to win that one.  Next
challenge will be where I broke about 8000 database design rules to track
a particularly nasty clump of data.


j



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