I'm wondering if there are any applications, preferably freeware, that can take a database configuration, and, with as little hassle as possible, create web forms for inserting data easily.
I'm finding it hard to express exactly what it is I'm after. Maybe I can talk a bit about what I need.
I have a configuration database that, at least usually, contains "the truth" about the servers in our system. It contains stuff like zone names, hostnames, different configuration items, etc, over multiple tables. Right now we're using simple INSERTs directly when adding new servers or other stuff, handling the keys and IDs ourselves. The crux is, they don't want us to develop a simple web form thingy to handle this, instead they want a tool that can generate the web form thingy. Did that make sense?
I'm not sure if anything like this exists or is reliable, but, I thought that if anyone knew, it's this community. Thanks!
As many have already stated, it depends on what technology you're working with:
.Net 3.5 - Dynamic Data or Subsonic's Scaffolding control
.Net 2.0 - Subsonic's Scaffolding control
PHP - CakePHP
Ruby - Rail's Scaffolding component
"with as little hassle as possible"
have you checked things like PHP/MySQL Web Database Application Code Generator 10.02 ?
or phpmyedit ?
seems to me that what everybody else proposed so far requires a fair amount of coding...
Also, have a look at phprunner. It is not free, but looking at the screenshots, it seems to fit your requirements.
ASP.NET has Dynamic Data, that I think fits your description.
There's also SubSonic. Both are free and open source.
Tried Dynamic Data?
Besides ASP.NET dynamic data, you could also have a look at SubSonic
With PHP, if you have the ability to name the tables and columns as you see fit, you could try CakePHP framework, and specifically the scaffolding feature. With scaffolding turned on, the code will create CRUD forms from the schema for you.
Here's the link for learning about SubSonic & Scaffolding http://www.subsonicproject.com/web-forms-controls/the-scaffold/
, enjoy ;)
One more link from the SubSonic forums http://monk.thelonio.us/post/Scaffold-Enhancements-in-SubSonic-21.aspx
You can try Adminer Editor
Adminer Editor is both easy-to-use and user-friendly database editing tool written in PHP. It is suitable for common users, as it provides high-level data manipulation.
Related
We're currently building a new application and part of the functionality we want to include for users is the ability to build ad-hoc querys through the web UI for reporting purposes.
e.g. The user may select the Entity1 report.
They are then able to select the criteria through the UI
pseudo example:
((Entity1.Type = 'this' OR Entity1.Type = 'something else') AND Entity1.CreatedDate > '01-01'2012')
Does anyone know if there is a good solution available (open source or paid) as this seems like it might be a lot of work to implement a bespoke solution.
Further to this we are using Entity Framework v4.1 magical unicorn edition.
If you build a UI that gives results in a structured form (e.g. {entityType.property}{operation}{value}) then it should be fairly straightforward to dynamically build an expression for this.
I decided to use http://devtools.korzh.com/query-builder-aspnet/ as it has saved me a lot of development time.
What's the recommended way of creating a Data Access layer in real-life ASP.NET MVC applications? Is it EF? Ef Code First? NHibernate? Any other idea?
Thank you & regards
There is no recommend way.
I prefer EF Code First for doing this because
the Sourcecode is very clean and easy to read
It is easy to simple change the connectionstring and generate a new database if not already exists
easy to migrate your Database if your Model has changed (no need to recreate the Database) using EntityFramework.SqlMigrations
if your Database already exists you can use the Entity Framework Power Tools to generate the Models and Database context from your existing Database
It all depends of your need:
NHibernate is a more mature ORM with a big community
Entity Framework is now getting very well supported and you can find also great information (check Julie Lerman blog)
Both support code generation from database.
Code first: allows you to create your database schema from your domain models. This is great if you don't want to bother with database. NHibernate can do it also.
To help you decide which way to use Entity Framework
Source
There are many other great ORM:
Subsonic
Stackoverflow's ORM Dapper if performance is an important criteria there is a small benchmark on the site
If you're partial to the MSFT tooling and wanting to be "modern", then EF Code First is probably the place to start. One example worth perusing: https://github.com/NuGet/NuGetGallery .
I like to use Model First because it allows me the most freedom to design and implement in my opinion. It also makes it very easy to change the database design.
There is none, stackoverflow is full of people who have gone down the various routes, so you can get help no matter which choice you make.
Best advice, try doing a few small exploratory webs using a couple of approaches which seem to stand out.
The MVC gurus (the people who wrote MVC) at MS all seem to use Entity Framework at the moment. having said that you can use any ORM (or really any data access tech you want) as MVC doesnt actually specify anything at all about the way you access data
Try LINQ, most MVC products I see make use of LINQ.
I just saw nice little demo about Oracle ADF Rich components: http://download.oracle.com/otn_hosted_doc/jdeveloper/11gdemos/adffaces/adffaces.html.
Looks really cool, nice and easy but of course its just a demo :). I would like to ask if someone actually uses it for a production app, how they compare to popular open source alternatives like RichFaces or IceFaces etc.
How about a deployment to a different server than weblogic?
We use ADF Faces. It is quite good. They have all the basic components(input text, output text, input file, date pickers, tables, etc) and some advanced components(graphs, tree,tree tables, etc). The layout components are also good and will suffice for most use cases.
But as with any JSF component, ADF Faces Components are hard to modify. For instance, if you want to add, say, a placeholder text, on an input text then you need to resort to fragile hacks.
I would recommend ADF Faces for enterprise apps where the ability to alter and fine tune UI components is not as important as fast and low cost development.
Also, ADF Faces isn't just a component framework. It is a full ViewController framework. Check out their Task Flows and you will be amazed.
We also use ADF Framework for our current product where we migrate our existing form based product to the new framework.
The major benefit that I'd like to point out in ADF is the way they promote declarative programming. I have to admit being a strong java developer, I have the tendency to go and add my own programmatic handling, but for someone who is used to forms, they will find it easy to learn the basics.
A strong feature that I also like to point is the way they clearly defined the MVC architecture. Model = BC, Controller = TaskFlow, View = well this one is obvious. Kudos to ADF the way they designed the taskflows as you get to have a visual representation or better put, a story of your design as well as your logic.
I am not sure about using a different server as ADF along with JDeveloper gives quite a load of features which allows you to configure directly to your server and be able to test on your intergrated server as well, with this I mean more on the security side as well as authentication piece of it. So even if you are able to migrate all the libraries needed, you might still be missing out in some of the other technologies that can be easily integrated with a weblogic server. (such as webcenter, soa etc.)
Does anyone know of a simple WPF or Silverlight framework which enables you to e.g. define some database tables in e.g. SQL Server compact database and then the framework automatically creates the Window classes etc. which allows a user to login and edit that data?
I'm not looking for a complicated MVVM pattern example, it can be hard coded, it should just save the developer the time of creating all the CRUD code and forms and authorization necessary for users to edit the data. The developer could define 10 database tables, run the code generation, and then be pretty much 80% finished with any simple database application he wanted to make.
All of that would be generic code so I would think some framework like this would exist or someone would be working on some open source project like this already.
Does anyone know of a framework or tool like this?
It's not Silverlight, but ASP.NET Dynamic Data sounds like it would do what you're asking. It provides a web-based front end for editing database tables.
I've used it for a small project and you can literally have it up and running with CRUD functionality within an hour.
maybe you should take a look at the Sculpture project. There might be something you are looking for.
Since you cannot have direct connection to a database server with Silverlight, you should look at a .NET data access framework using the regular .NET Framework thru a Web Service.
i have played around with dynamic data website. is there something similar for winforms.
if there isn't anything out there for doing the same with winforms than the question would be why not? we have a massive ERP application that we want to migrate from AS400 to .Net
Winform application. my initial thoughts were to have all the maintenances be as simple as Dynamic Data Website project.
I would think that WPF would be a better starting point then WinForms, as it has support for style to say how item of data are displayed.
Dynamic Data makes it easy to edit your DB on the web. For desktop (and web) apps take a look at the new Microsoft LightSwitch:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lightswitch/gg441300
LightSwitch doesn't use Windows Forms. Rather it creates a Silverlight App that can run both on the desktop and the web. Pretty cool.
Dynamic data is using the routing functionality of the MVC framework. In Windows forms we don't have this approach of fetching data with URLs from a server.
I am not sure how this model could fit into Windows forms.
I think it's pretty hard to create something like dynamic data for Windows Forms.
My biggest concern is here, once you created that Framework, how do you configure it? I mean if you want to change 1 form to be a bit different than the others :-)
I think its better to generate Forms for the various tables in the Database context, using a powerful Grid control from one of the big vendors. And then you can configure those.
Remember this is a different approach then the dynamic data one, where no code is generated before compile time
I think the reason you don't see something like this in winform applications is because it's much easier to store a HTML page inside a database and then display it on the screen formatted properly when using a web application because your browser knows how to format the HTML.
You would have to, stored in the database, know where each label and field would go on the form in some sort of co-ordinates fashion (or you could use a layout 3rd party control) but the amount of work that would take might be tedious to do properly.
The dynamic data website I worked on did not take input from the user. It only displayed different web pages to the user and allowed the admin person to easily make changes to the content. If you wanted a user to beable to save data then that would even be more complex because you have to worry about validation, required fields, etc.
If you have lots of users that need to see different information based on their access level then I would just suggest having a table in the database that tells the system whether or not they should see the field on the form. Then use a 3rd party layout panel to format the visible fields.
my 2 cents
As much as Dynamic Data looks simple and cheap enough to access a database it wouldn't work for an ERP system anyways. Business systems are more than moving data between database and the user interface, they require business rule actions when saving data and while retrieving the may require some massaging to ensure meaningful presentation of storage optimized data.
If you still like to pursue this option it would be very easy to create an application that is build on top of Entity Framework.
I'm not aware of a Dynamic-Data-alike, but (having written one before, years ago, for ASP) I don't actually think it would be that hard, particularly with WPF and its templating support.
Actually if you were really clever you could probably 'borrow' the backend from Dynamic Data, and just reimplement the UI as WPF.
Would make a fun little project actually.
Alternative answer: Use Microsoft Access. No really.
Alternative answer #2: So why not just use Dynamic Data then?