Does anyone have any preferred packages for designing forms with fields pulled from a MySQL database, and then processing the form data back into the DB?

Working on a music site, and I have tables for bands, albums, tracks, record labels, official band site links, etc. I'd like to use the package to design the backend admin part of the site, for entering and editing new content. I've got phpMyAdmin and DaDaBik now, which are each nice for some things, but ideally I want something that will pull all the data for a single band onto one page and allow it to be edited (so processing with foreign keys is a good thing, too).

I've seen a number of things on hotscripts, but so far nothing really looks like what I'm shooting for. Most of it is more oriented towards user-submitted forms and email responses or confirmations, instead of administrative content management.

10/25/2006 7:08:35 PM

I dont know of anything automated to that level, but there are plenty of form design apps out there that can do what you want with a little elbow grease. Since these are end user forms, I dont think it's a good idea in the first place to leave an automated system in their hands.

10/25/2006 7:10:25 PM

PHPRunner is supposed to allow you to create something like this easily, but I tried it once, and it was just messy and pretty hard to customize.

Just pay someone to do it for you ... you can get a student who knows how to do it for 15/hour probably, or just outsource it to india for 8/hour.

10/26/2006 7:36:41 AM

i've been looking for something basically just like that for a while now. i kind of want a low-level CMS - i don't want to install a CMS, but I want to allow users on a site (a cycling team, so it's a small, defined set of users) to edit certain things like their bios and results, which are stored in mySQL.
I have set up all the forms myself, but it's really a pain in the ass. The queries are easy, but all the form handling really tedious. so i've been looking for something basically like you're talking about - a stylized front-end to the database where they can edit the fields themselves, without me having to write and deal with all the forms.

Having looked at Dadabik for 5 minutes, it looks like that would actually work. What don't you like about it? It says it can deal with foreign keys fine.
In dadabik, are you saying you're not able to specialize the queries enough, as to, for example, select and edit one band at a time?

10/26/2006 10:53:28 AM

This has been a classic problem since the early days of SQL Server and ASP

10/26/2006 11:29:32 AM

Right. In Dadabik and a number of other similar products, it handles foreign key processing, but it still only lets you present one table's worth of information per page, and inserting one row at a time. So for instance, to input a band with Dadabik, I would need to enter it in the Band table on Dadabik. Then I would change to the page for the album table, select the band (this is the foreign key work that Dadabik does; it will look up the band name for me, display that, and then enter the corresponding band ID # into the album table for me--I never have to know the actual ID #'s I'm linking on things), insert an album. Then I would change to the page for the tracks table, indicate the album I want, insert a track. Indicate the same album again, insert another track. Repeat for every track. Then go back to the album page, insert another album, etc.

It would be an easy mod to change the tracks page to let me insert more than one track at a time, so that doesn't bother me. But what I want is the ability to combine the actual pages into one updatable page using these foreign key relationships, instead of just pulling a name from one table into the page for another table. I want to select the band, then be able to see its label, members, albums, tracks, all on one page and be able to easily edit any of it or add new bits.

I can do it manually, but I'm lazy and wanted to explore the world of pre-existing code to see if something already is out there that fits the bill.

On that note, has anyone used the Clonefish class before (http://www.phpformclass.com/page/about)? I saw it while exploring, and it looks like it could make things a lot easier on me if I did go the manual route. Trouble is, it costs $99 for the professional version that lets you dynamically select form items, and I don't want to pay that much without being sure it's what I need, and I would need to try it out to verify that; I'd rather use it, build the site, and then buy the product to pay them for their work. There's too much shitty code out there with nice websites for me to shell out big bucks without knowing for certain that it's going to deliver.

10/27/2006 1:34:13 AM

While it may seem at first like there's a simple and mechanical solution that could couple your interface with your database schema, however such a thing is very rarely a good idea; as your customer (in this case, yourself) will always have "something different" in mind. This was one of the big shortcomings of Microsoft Access (AFAIK; I never messed with it, myself).

10/27/2006 3:15:25 AM

the problem is that what you are trying to do is not very simple. it is actually pretty custom. no out of the box software is going to do it the way you want and no class is goign to be able to design it for you.

If you want some help with it, let me know. I've designed similar things before.

10/27/2006 8:27:01 AM

I don't see why a package like Dadabik shouldn't be able to allow the user to customize the table views. It's not that hard to JOIN tables together - just make sure the foreign keys are marked properly and allow the admin to select which fields from each table should show up in the joined table.
or even allow the admin to insert SQL queries directly that will show up as single tables in the user form.

10/27/2006 9:56:10 AM

It's not simple.

Your organization of data in an RDBMS, if designed well, is significantly different than the logical presentation of that data. Just giving a user a "table view" is, in the best case, going to give them too much information. In the worst case, they aren't going to have any idea what's going on.

There's a reason we have UI design, there are many reasons why this process shouldn't be automated.

10/27/2006 10:20:40 AM

I agree with everyone's statements here. I mainly asked because the last time I did something similar was in 2003, and I was curious if any packages or classes had matured enough to be capable of this in the three years since I've touched any web design. I wasn't expecting a completely out-the-box solution where I would never see a line of php, but I was just hoping there might be something a little bit closer to my goal than Dadabik that I could tweak to finish the job. I guess not. But thanks to all of you for letting me know what's possible and what isn't these days.


This thread is now about Clonefish. Anyone use it or take a look at the link I posted about it? Thoughts on whether this is a good thing that could significantly improve my timeline, since I'll be doing it all manually now? Or have other good classes you know about (preferably freeware or GPL) that have been helpful to you in php/MySQL interfacing and/or form design?

10/27/2006 4:19:03 PM

I'd check out the PEAR and PHPlib form management and validation classes (http://www.sanisoft.com/phplib/manual/oohforms.php)

10/27/2006 4:25:32 PM

robster - you have any other details on your problems with PHPRunner? The guys at Gadgetopia seem to like it, and they're usually very picky - http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/3339
http://www.xlinesoft.com/phprunner/index.htm
but $300? wtf.....

i'm going to try it out and see how it works, although it would have to write whole websites with a click of a button for me to pay $300 for it.....

going to try PHPMagic too - http://www.websitedatabases.com/phpmagic-overview.html
if that's good, it might be worth $50

12/29/2006 3:58:21 PM

it actually may be ok if you just want quick simple forms, but I found when I used it that the forms were lacking in features, so I was going to be forced into customizing it, and the code it creates is very heavy and just a headache to mess with.

But, if you dont need to spice it up any, it may be just great.

12/29/2006 4:12:14 PM

Robster,

I guess that was a while since you checked PHPRunner. Now it comes with WYSIWYG visual editor which makes customization much easier.

Anyway if someone needs to get a GOOD discount on PHPRunner contact me directly at support AT xlinesoft.com.

12/30/2006 1:17:31 AM

haha, gg

12/30/2006 1:50:57 AM

^^ wow - now that's customer service. they must monitor all their incoming links or referrers or something.

I breifly tried PHPRunner last night. There is a seemingly comprehensive 21 step wizard to get everything setup. I was in a rush, so I skipped directly to "Finish" after step 4, but even at that, it built a functional table editor. Skimming through some of the other steps it looked like there was lots of interface cutomization available.

12/30/2006 10:09:43 AM

maybe ill give it a try when some other "business app" contract projects come my way...

not useful for what I do now.


It was about a year ago when I first tried it out....

12/30/2006 12:40:41 PM

btw - i contacted the xline guy about phprunner and he will give a good deal. Still, a pretty good amount to spend on php/mysql software, but much more reasonable than the list price.

now that i've played with phprunner more, i found it does exactly what I need. You kind of have to experiment a lot in it, but it can fully handle complex table JOINs, views, lookups, etc. I have several somewhat cryptic tables with lots of foreign keys, and after some tweaking, I got phprunner to give fully human readable tables that end-users can use to edit the table data.

Some of the features are not as readily apparent as I had hoped, and the WYSIWYG editor leaves some things to be desired (the graphical editor seems likely to produce bad code if you start cutting/pasting links and items, and the css support is lacking), but overall, it's able to handle exactly what I was looking for.

[Edited on March 9, 2007 at 11:03 AM. Reason : .]

3/9/2007 10:58:22 AM

My biggest problem with it was the bulky underlying code it produced... It was a headache to go through back then, as I wanted to tweak the basic sample it gave me.

3/9/2007 2:52:15 PM

yes - for a small application i had with 3 tables, which included list, view record, edit, add, export and print for each table, plus a login page (created by phprunner), there is something like 190 php files created. So far, though, I haven't found any need to go into the actual files and edit anything. I've done everything through the phprunner interface. So the first time it's built, it builds the huge number of files and uploads them, but from then on, depending on what you change, just a handful of files will be touched and require re-uploading.

3/9/2007 3:06:01 PM

You could just use myspace.

3/9/2007 8:12:16 PM

Quote :

"My biggest problem with it was the bulky underlying code it produced... It was a headache to go through back then, as I wanted to tweak the basic sample it gave me."

that's the same problem i have with anything that "generates" code... beyond say... generating container javabean POJOs from hibernate mappings.

3/10/2007 11:57:27 PM

fuckin ORACLE!!!!1

3/11/2007 5:25:15 PM