pdt256 wrote:
Anyone know of a management tool that will allow the expanding of
one-many relationships in individual tuples of a table? Much like msoft
access but in a web based format. I've created a simple php script that
will read a database and do this simply, but I don't want to put any
more effort to reinvent the wheel if I don't have to. It would be nice
to have rollover effects that would reference any table that has a
foreign key that references the current primary key in a table row. I
think access implements a plus/minus tree for one-many relationships.
Hope that explains it...
-JI
In our system we call that a 'drilldown'. Not a very creative name, but
easily recognizable by the user.
Roughly speaking, each table in the database has a maintenance page. At the
bottom of each page is a list of "drilldowns". These are tables that have
a foreign key into this table. If you click one, it invokes the
maintenance page for that table with a filter applied that equals the row
you were viewing in the parent table.
In the opposite direction, we have a "drill up". Each column of the table
has some caption. If the column is a foreign key to another table, the
caption is a hyperlink, which jumps to the table and selects that row.
In real-world use, we are looking to improve our display of the drilldown,
we've tried it on the right side of the form and users did not respond well
and we are finding that it works better on the bottom of the form, but we
still think it is not perfect.
The "drill up" we are finding is not immediately obvious to naive users, but
more advanced users tend to say things like, "hey cool."
All you need to implement it is a data dictionary of some sort that lists
foreign keys. There are many ways to use it at the PHP level, but what we
do is run a routine at installation that build PHP files that contain
associative arrays that define the dd on a per-table basis, allowing nifty
stuff like this:
include("ddtable_".$table_id.".php");
....and now you know everything about the table.
--
Kenneth Downs
Secure Data Software, Inc.
(Ken)nneth@(Sec)ure(Dat)a(.com)