Hi All

I would like to ask for a new wobject to be developed, called "collection"

I am asking this after I really did try to use thingies for what I need and even considered developing the wobject myself, based on the thingy code,  but it seem that I do need a new kind of wobject and that it has to be written from scratch.

In principle, collections are similar to thingies - that is they allow creating tables of data that users can manipulate and search. The main difference is that the data of all collections in a site will reside in a single set of tables (unlike thigies which have some common tables but also use a new table for every thingy created). This should allow for a much more powerful search capabilities and some additional important functionality, and I think it might be useful for many projects. I already have most of the design, including the required tables structure and even some of the Perl code. I just cannot invest the time and effort right now to make it into a WebGui wobject.

So if anyone from the official WebGui staff or outside of it is willing to start developing this, please contact me via E-mail (orenshani@nana.co.il). Like I said, I can provide much more detail and of course, participate in anyway I can (I might even do some of the coding once there is some kind of a prototype to work on).

Many thanks,

Oren

On Sunday 28 December 2008 12:37:56 pm orenshani@nana.co.il wrote:
> In principle, collections are similar to thingies - that is they
> allow creating tables of data that users can manipulate and search. The
> main difference is that the data of all collections in a site will
> reside in a single set of tables (unlike thigies which have some
> common tables but also use a new table for every thingy created). This
> should allow for a much more powerful search capabilities and some
> additional important functionality, and I think it might be useful
> for many projects. I already have most of the design, including the
> required tables structure and even some of the Perl code. I just cannot
> invest the time and effort right now to make it into a WebGui wobject.

What you're talking about sounds like the predecessor of the Thingy,
called SQL Form.  If you search the Developer's Forum, you'll
find many articles about it.

This article talks about how to find it now:
http://www.webgui.org/webgui/dev/discuss/future-of-sql-form-in-webgui-7.5#xwymFJT0dlfYQxnr8-Jxag

Colin

Colin,

As far as I understand the sqlform is a very large and complex thing and not realy what I need . Would you be interested in more details of what I have in mind?

Thanks, anyway,

Oren

On Tuesday 06 January 2009 11:37:10 am orenshani@nana.co.il wrote:
> As far as I understand the sqlform is a very large and complex thing and not
realy what I need . Would you be interested in more details of what I have in
mind?

Sure.  Fire away.

Colin

Colin,

Okay but before I explain the whole idea I want to show you just a part that deals with its sql tables structure. This is because I would first like to know if you think that this is feasble at all. Also, once you understand this part and how it is differentiates collections from thingies it will be easier for me to explain the rest of the idea.

So SQL-wise, collections have a very simple concept. There is a table for each data type (numeric, text, time/date, etc.) with only two columns in each - a numeric index and a data column of the corresponding type and then there are 3 more general tables: a list of collections, a matching table of collections and collection columns to column data types and a matching table of collections, columns and rows to value indexes. You can see in the attached Perl script an example of listing a collection called "users' (it a bit dirty but you will understand what it does...) how the structure is used to list a collection called "users" (see also attached the main query command that is generated by the main loop in the script to query the data).

So what you get from this is sort of a virtual database over the mysql database. I will explain further about the advantages I see in this structure later, but in the mean time, what do you think about this?