Managed tabular data "dump"

[BrendonKoz]

I'm having a hard time trying to understand how to do one particular type of task within ProcessWire. I'm hoping some of you others have dealt with this problem already and found an elegant solution to deal with it.

The primary website that I maintain for my employer has quite a few pages that are basically just simple HTML representation of a non-relational table in the database. It's required to be managed (CRUD) with regard to the fields/rows in the database. However, there are a few tables that have upwards of 400 rows. (It's quite a bit to show on a single page, I know, that's how they want it portrayed.)

Getting the data FROM ProcessWire is easy enough with a custom template.

My concern is the administration of the data.

I started looking at each row as a "repeater" type. Repeater types can fill up vertical space on the page very quickly and therefore (unfortunately) are unsuited for quick and easy management. Creating a single record for each value would also clutter the administrative interface rather quickly.

I've seen soma's "jQuery Data Table AJAX" module which seems to be the closest solution, but since it's listed as an alpha and not to be used in production I have (unfortunately) not looked at it too closely to know if it supports all PW field types, or just text...

I've also been asked to redevelop a running club's website. They upload and save the running/race results to their website. They'd like to be able to search for a particular user and automatically have all of their race results show up (and potentially run formulas on them to calculate different metrics). This would require that the fields are all visible individually within ProcessWire (and not an external database - which I was thinking might have been a possible solution previously).

Any ideas or thoughts? Comments? I can't imagine I'd be the first to run in to this.

[Wanze]

Hi BrendonKoz,

For an active project I'm using Pw templates and fields to model/store my data coming from another database.

But I don't let users see the Pages tree. For some data, I'm not using the ProcessWire 'ProcessPageEdit' Process to edit the pages.

I created my own Process module which displays the data from a page in a form. Then I save everything via API.

This way you can quickly use standard form modules from Pw but you're also free to generate your own markup beside that.

For example the repeaters could (maybe) be displayed in a table which doesn't eat up that much vertical space.

With the 'InputfieldMarkup' module you can display whatever kind of stuff you like - would be a solution to display calculations / metrics for your second project mentioned.

[kongondo]

For an active project I'm using Pw templates and fields to model/store my data coming from another database.

But I don't let users see the Pages tree. For some data, I'm not using the ProcessWire 'ProcessPageEdit' Process to edit the pages.

I created my own Process module which displays the data from a page in a form. Then I save everything via API..

Not wishing to hijack this thread, I'd love to know more how you accomplish this please? (if you can share, i.e.) How do you model/store data coming in from another database using PW templates and fields? Thanks.

[BrendonKoz]

kongondo, that's not really a hijack of the thread/topic.

Wanze, I too would be interested to know a little more detail of how you went about doing this. Most of the things that I've done in ProcessWire are simply using the core functionality, except for with templates which I simply refer to soma's API cheatsheet (which is fabulous). I've only done one module thus far which was 99% based on Ryan's RSS Module (I swapped RSS for JSON). My experience beyond that would be minimal.

Example: I looked at the InputfieldMarkup.module but wasn't entirely clear on how to even use it.

If anyone else has other suggestions for the original question or to broaden my eyes towards the awesomeness that Wanze is trying to describe, I'd be grateful.

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

Wanze: I also would be interested in your solution!

I have been making great progress creating front-end interfaces with ProcessWire and forms, but I am always interested in how others implement this. I am especially interested in seeing how you get repeaters working this way.

Thanks.

Matthew

[BrendonKoz]

Hmm, it looks like I might be able to use Wanze's Batcher ProcessModule as an example to start from to figure out how to go about doing things in this way (displaying fields in a tabular manner). I should have thought to check the ProcessModules before when Wanze had mentioned creating something... :-/