Re: Possible Add-on?

[Chris Bennett <..hidden..>]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 07:39:54PM -0800, Chris Travers wrote:
> 
> So what we are talking about here is engineered to order and
> configured to order sorts of things?  I think such an add-on would in
> fact be very useful.
> 
> Longer-run I would recommend trying to tie this in to projects some
> how but that may be after 1.4.....
> 

t I have for accessing the data offers viewing, with searching for items in fields, inserting new data and updating e
xisting data.
For products, I have a class and subclass. Say Lumber class and treated wood subclass and a vendor_name.
I use these three so often that I have three drop down lists for these.
Using javascript, as I select a particular table, two separate drop down search fields get changes to the fields for tha
t particular table.
In those I can enter search terms for a 'similar to' search.

This lets me do the following:

select products table
Select class Drywall
Select subclass Screws
Select vendor Drywall Thingies
Search field product_description for %Hillman% (to get these particular)
Search field product_description for %5/8% to get only 5/8 inch long screws

Which gives me Drwall screws that are 5/8 inch long and have Hillman in the description
that Drywall Thingies sells instead of 150 rows of screws.

These could be changed to whatever fields/tables someone finds most useful.
I use basically the same interface, with different choices for my labor database.
More select a field search boxes could be added, with additional options.
I never got around to adding a search for NULL values.
I nevered added for deleting because I prefer to very carefully do that with psql after a dump for safety.

I don't see much change needed if someone wants to use regular CGI instead of mod_perl.
A quick and dirty solution would be to have $r->print(qq{}); refer to a cgi sub.
Or just write up a whole new interface.

But yes, This does a wonderful job of organizing a large database into useful categories to search for.

Chris Bennett