NYCPHP Meetup

[Edward Potter]

I was playing around with this awhile back also. I always thought that 
you could send XML back and forth, and when it landed on various 
servers, it would create the database's for you. Sort of a viral-db 
thing...  But of course then I became unemployed... :-)


On Thursday, October 17, 2002, at 01:10 PM, Adam Fields wrote:

> The following is a high level description of a general system I'm
> currently building. I'd love to get some feedback on whether such a
> thing is interesting to you, and what features you'd like to see.
>
> ----------
>
> Starting from a user perspective, there are a few levels, and at each
> level you define the behavior of the system with an XML file (or
> generate one from some interactive choices).
>
> At the lowest level, you define datasets, which are made up of fields,
> each of which has a data types. Each data set corresponds to a table
> in the database, and each field you want to manage must be listed in
> the description. I've imposed some restrictions on the structure of
> the tables (this makes things a lot easier to dynamically manage, and
> corresponds to my style in making relational databases, and I don't
> think it's too restrictive, but I'm open to suggestions) :
>
> - currently, you must use mysql. This will change eventually.
>
> - each table must have an autogenerated primary key, named
> "<tablename>_id"
>
> - each table must have an integer field called "status"
>
> - foreign keys must have the same field name in both tables
>
> - if you want to support versions, each table must have a
> corresponding table called "<tablename>_updates" with id, object
> (blob) structure.
>
> Field types correspond to commonly used html structures - text,
> textarea, select (you can either specify the options in the definition
> or specify a table to read name/value pairs from), date (which pops up
> a calendar), image (which gives you a file choose box and saves the
> uploaded file on disk).
>
> Relations to other tables are handled in two ways - there's a field
> type called "contains" that takes a data set as a parameter. Also,
> data set types are supported - currently, I support "item" and
> "relation". Item datasets represent single-item tables, which may
> reference other tables with contains fields (1:n) relations. Relation
> datasets represent n:n mapping tables and must contain references to
> exactly two item datasets.
>
> There's a script which will read the xml files and output the db
> creation SQL (or connect to the database directly and just do
> it).
>
> So... you've got all these datasets, which represent a relational
> database structure. The system defines ways to operate on the
> datasets, which are represented currently either by a single-screen or
> a two-screen form and form handler. It doesn't currently support field
> validation, but because of the structure, it would be fairly easy to
> add. So for editing, all you do is hand the renderer a dataset name,
> an appropriate mode, and an id for an existing item (unless you're
> adding a new one), and it gives you a dynamically generated form for
> doing so, based on your data definition. It also lets you do some
> traversal of the relations to edit other connected items.
>
> There's a dynamic display component as well, but the details are in
> progress.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> --
> 				- Adam
>
> -----
> Adam Fields, Managing Partner, fields at surgam.net
> Surgam, Inc. is a technology consulting firm with strong background in
> delivering scalable and robust enterprise web and IT applications.
> http://www.adamfields.com
>
>
> --- Unsubscribe at http://nyphp.org/list ---
>
>