I am interning for a company that manufactures parts and has to run a number of tests for chromaticity, brightness, contrast, ect. Currently, they are using MS Access as a front-end to input their data, which is then printed out as a report when they are finished. The data is not stored anywhere. Also, for some reason they have also created these "data forms" using excel which also do not store the data anywhere. It is my job to find a solution that will allow them to store all of their data in a mySQL database for later use, however, since they are using multiple UIs to input the data, I am unsure what to do. I have already come to an agreement with my superiors that they need to merge into a single UI, so...
Here are my options:
1) Attempt to link their already functional MS Access UI to my mySQL database (which could be a horrendous failure since I know nothing of Access), and convert all excel forms to Access forms
2) Convert their Access forms into Excel forms and then have to deal with capturing data from excel which is an extremely tedious coding job since there are about 50+ cells I need to capture in each of there hundreds of documents.
3) Create a PHP application that will allow an administrator to add attributes and define fields which will create a form and corresponding mySQL table for that form. Basically, taking the capabilities of the Access form builder/ forms and putting them into a web application. Would this take very long to do so from scratch?
Sorry, this was long, but I am the only one with programming background here and am just an intern, haha, so I need some advice.
Thanks
Matt
Approach number 3 could be done quickly with Symphony CMS. You would create a section for each form, and then you (or an admin) would add fields to that section using Symphony's GUI section editor. The form would then be available in the CMS, and ready for adding entries with.
Symphony CMS is very flexible, and you could generate reports (HTML or other formats) using it. It also has a RESTful API.
There'a also a CSV importing extension, which might be good for your Excel data.
Related
I just took over a pretty terrible database design job, which heavily use comma separated value to store data. I know I know, it is hell.
The db is mysql, currently accessing it using MySql Workbench.
I already had idea in mind what to remove, and what new relations table needed.
So, my question is, how shall I proceed by migrating comma separated data to the new table? Any tools specialize for normalizing database?
Edit:
The server code is in PHP.
Define you new tables and attributes first.
Then, use PHP or Python or your favorite language with MySQL calls and write a 1 time converter which loops and reads the old table(s) and records and inserts the proper records into the new tables.
It appears you are looking for standard practices. There are varying degree of denormalized databases out there. The ones I have come across have been normalized with custom code and tools.
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) can be used for some case. In your case, I'd build a script for the migration that involves:
creation of normalized tables
creating stored procedure or PHP script(s) to read data from denormalized table, transform it and load it into normalized table
creating a log table or log file
performing the migration in sandbox; write logs while doing so
version control the script
correct the proc/script as needed
create another sandbox
run the full script on sandbox
if successful, run the full script on prod (with logging)
SSIS is used for ETL in many organizations; it's standard tool for Microsoft BI stack and can also be used to migrate data between non-Microsoft DBs also.
Open Source ETL tool called Talend might also help in transforming your data. I personally believe that a PHP script will be the fastest and easiest to manipulate data.
I'm currently building a web-app which displays data from .csv files for the user, where they are edited and the results stored in a mySQL database.
For the next phase of the app I'm looking at implementing the functionality to write the results into ** existing .DBF** files using PHP as well as the mySQL database.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Actually there's a third route which I should have thought of before, and is probably better for what you want. PHP, of course, allows two or more database connections to be open at the same time. And I've just checked, PHP has an extension for dBase. You did not say what database you are actually writing to (several besides the original dBase use .dbf files), so if you have any more questions after this, state what your target database actually is. But this extension would probably work for all of them, I imagine, or check the list of database extensions for PHP at http://php.net/manual/en/refs.database.php. You would have to try it and see.
Then to give an idea on how to open two connections at once, here's a code snippet (it actually has oracle as the second db, but it shows the basic principles):
http://phplens.com/adodb/tutorial.connecting.to.multiple.databases.html
There's a fair bit of guidance and even tutorials on the web about multiple database connections from PHP, so take a look at them as well.
This is a standard kind of situation in data migration projects - how to get data from one database to another. The answer is you have to find out what format the target files (in this case the format of .dbf files) need to be in, then you simply collect the data from your MySQL file, rearrange it into the required format, and write a new file using PHP's file writing functions.
I am not saying it's easy to do; I don't know the format of .dbf files (it was a format used by dBase, but has been used elsewhere as well). You not only have to know the format of the .dbf records, but there will almost certainly be header info if you are creating new files (but you say the files are pre-existing so that shouldn't be a problem for you). But the records may also have a small amount of header data as well, which you would need to write to work out and each one in the form required.
So you need to find out the exact format of .dbf files - no doubt Googling will find you info on that. But I understand even .dbf can have various differences - in which case you would need to look at the structure of your existing files to resolve those if needed).
The alternative solution, if you don't need instant copying to the target database, is that it may have an option to import data in from CSV files, which is much easier - and you have CSV files already. But presumably the order of data fields in those files is different to the order of fields in the target database (unless they came from the target database, but then you wouldn't presumably, be trying to write it back unless they are archived records). The point I'm making, though, is you can write the data into CSV files from the PHP program, in the field order required by your target database, then read them into the target database as a seaparate step. A two stage proces in other words. This is particularly suitable for migrations where you are doing a one off transfer to the new database.
All in all you have a challenging but interesting project!
I am working on a website which utilizes a table for presenting old and newly passed laws. As such it requires that we have a large volume of data in the tables, and we constantly have to add more data to the tables.
I know already how to construct the table through CSS and HTML; however, due to the sheer volume of data which we are dealing with, I would like to know if there is a way to create a separate admin page where we can just plug in the law information and have it automatically added to the table rather than having to physically code in all of the information through HTML.
I also have a second question: I would like to add some tabs at the top of the table which allows users to sort laws based on the year they were passed. An example of this can be seen at this site: CT Legislation | 2014 | General Assembly | Passed | LegiScan . It has several tabs at the top which allow users to sort legislation- my question is what coding language is required to add this to a table?
A CMS may or may not do it for you. What really would be good is to use Parse to hold all your data. Take a look at Data Storage and Cloud Code. You can add new laws whenever you want, and you would configure Parse to dynamically add the data to your table for you.
You can use a variety of languages for this type of solution. If it were all web based it would likely utilize php for building a password protected page (admin) page. It would also be used along with SQL to send/receive data from the Database, the it could use CSS/html for the table and content styling.
For the database you could use MYSQL (a type of database).
If this is beyond what you are comfortable with, a content management system (CMS) would be a great option. They set up the entire backend for the user and have an interface that will allow someone who knows zero code or html/CSS to put a pretty decent website together.
The great part about using wordpress is it lends itself well to someone looking to learn more about development. You can see how things can be set up with code to achieve certain outcomes and can learn more and more as you work with the system on increasingly deeper levels.
Another option is using google drive. There are tabs, a table and it is cloud based so you can share it with people you want to have access to it. Anyone you choose can add/delete and it keeps very good track of what is changed and who made the changes. It is really easy to go back an fix things if they have been messed up.
I am currently developing a website in PHP and I decided to go with gettext to manage the translations. I set up a nice Pootle server so that I can easily manage the translations and a bash script that runs with cron that extracts all of the values from the PHP files to be translated and creates the .pot translation template file.
So far, so good. However, I just remembered that part of the text of the site is stored in a database. Let's call it "products" for simplicity. I want the product description, name, and a few other fields to be translatable, but it would be great if I could have a centralized way to translate them without having to create a separate interface just to translate the database entries. Since Pootle is already set up, it would be nice to be able to use that.
I thought of two solutions:
Forget using a database and use only PHP arrays
Write a script that will extract all of the values from the database and generate a file that will then be scanned by the aforementioned bash script and add the values to the pot file, and another script that will run just after the bash script to re-update all of the values in the DB.
Neither of these solutions really seem to be ideal. The first one would be easy to set up and easy to use with Pootle, but I lose all flexibility that comes with using a DBMS and I would have to import the entire array every time I want to use it. Loss of functionality isn't really that bad, because I (currently) am not performing any advanced calculations on the rows, basically just SELECTs and that's it. The second one, could work, but would take significantly more planning (and coding) to set up correctly.
Are there any other ways that I'm missing that would give me the flexibility of a database, but allow me to easily translate it in a centralized place along with the rest of the site, like Pootle?
You can generate pot/po files directly from the database and feed them into Pootle then. Then you would be able to use gettext functions directly on values returned from database.
As an example, you can look at phpMyAdmin, where we use similar approach to translate structured text file.
I have a client that ask me to convert an Access database to something web based.
The database has 20 tables, 10 input forms (input of data is not done directly into tables), about 100 queries and 20 reports.
I don't mind using mssql/c# but I would prefer using php/mysql.
The client would like to have the ability to create himself custom report like it's possible in Access (WYSIWYG interface to select tables and fields and possibility to add header, footer, labels, etc.).
The solution can be something licensed but I would need something flexible as this is the first step of a bigger project.
Thank you very much in advance for your ideas/help.
Just convert the DB to Mysql and use an odbc driver to link access to the mysql db for report creation, what is the issue?
Maybe this tool or this.