M Go Blue

Update Forms

For our project, we wanted to be able to update data via the web. If somebody changed their address, got a new phone number, etc, we thought it would be nice to be able to update this information without altering their ID. So, we decided to implement this functionality. I was going to blog about my troubles relating to this yesterday night, but after working through it some more, it is now functioning just fine. No need to blog about a problem. So, I thought I'd blog about our success, and give some pointers to any other group that is considering implementing a similar ability, as it was kind of frustrating to figure out.

The key is that you cannot treat UPDATE the same as INSERT, meaning no bind-params and a bunch of question marks. Instead, in the relevant XSQL page, you need page-params and an UPDATE command similar to the following:

xsql:set-page-param name="itemA" value="{@itemA}"

UPDATE tableA SET itemA = '{@itemA}'
WHERE itemB = '{@itemB}';
COMMIT;

Hopefully this will help another group out that is trying to do this. If you want, you can check out this functionality by visiting our user interface page here.

Thank You Page and Formatting

In response to Maulin's post here, we, too, had problems with getting a thank you page to display correctly. We had tried it a number of different ways without much success, encountering the same problems you speak of. I, in fact, previously blogged about our troubles in this area. But, with some help in today's class, we were able to get it to work. Below are two files that you can check out to get an idea of how we got ours to function correctly. You have to create a new stylesheet for the thank you message, which contains little more than the thank you message itself, and also include code in the relevant XSQL page.

insertStory.xsql
thanksHTML.xsl

In regards to centering tables, changing fonts, etc, I think altering the cis320.css file can make these changes. Hope this helps.

Form Display Question

Our group has had trouble trying to get an html "thank you" message to display after successfully entering data into a form.  As it currently stands, code is displayed on the screen after a successful entry.  In XSQL6, an html page that says "Thanks" appears instead, and we'd like to do something like that for our project to make it look nicer.  But, we cannot figure out how to get this to work with our forms.

In insertOrderResult.xsl in XSQL6, there are lines that get the "Thanks" message to display. However, trying to apply this to our forms is difficult.  We do not have an iterative series of forms that continue to re-appear, and can be broken out of if a "No more" button is clicked, as is the case in XSQL6.  Instead, we just want it to display a "thank you" message after a single successful entry.  We have been unsuccessful in our attempts at trying to do this, as we cannot figure out where to insert the bit of code to make it work.  Depending on where we put the code, it will either display the "thank you" page and not enter data into the database, or it will enter data into the database and not display the "thank you" page.  But, it never does both at the same time.  Any advice?

Dropdown Menus

In response to the question about drop down menus here, you have to list an element to be displayed in menu.  The line "select donor_id from grant_program" selects donor_id from grant_program, but does not display anthing in the menu.  To display donor_id in the menu, you do the following:

select donor_id, donor_id from grant_program

Or, if you wanted to display the name of the donor in the dropdown menu instead of the ID, you could just as easily do that. I'm not sure if this is applicable to what you want to do, or if you have a name associated with the ID, but if you did, it would be written in a manner similar to the following:

select donor_id, first_name, last_name from grant_program

Project 2 Progress

Our group has been making good progress on the project and we are now able to view all of our Project 1 views in HTML, as well as having one entry form complete. Some advice when implementing forms that involve retrieving sequenced numbers from the database: remember to create the sequence to begin with. Overlooking this caused us a bit of frustration. Furthermore, we had some issues with getting the forms to generate the numbers in XSQL after creating the sequence, but after working at it, we have resolved the problem.

Specifically, we had originally created a sequence named "person_id," and could not get this to work for some time. After reviewing XSQL5 some more, we decided to try renaming the sequence "personid," as our original "person_id" label is also used as an attribute of a table in our database. This was possibly causing some processing confussion. Making this change got it to work. Either that, or we made some really minor change simultaneously, and it just coincidentally happened to work this time around. Anyway, we still have much to do, but are well on our way. For any group having trouble with the sequences, just keep on working at it and it should work out sooner or later.

ER Diagram software

I googled "ER diagrams" earlier today and saw a link to a site on the "Sponsored Links" right-hand panel for a compnay that sells a piece of software that makes professional looking ER diagrams. On a sidenote, I completely ignored these sponsored links until last week's lecture, but I feel like I will definetely pay more attention to them from now on. Anyway, I just downloaded a 30 day free trial version of the sofware, which is called Smart Draw.

After checking it out for only a few minutes, I can already say that it offeres way more than we really would want to make a nice looking diagram for our project, though we can certainly use it in this class. But, I think it would be truly valuable for an IT professional who might make a lot of ER diagrams, as it allows for the easy manipulation of diagram components. Entities and change relationships can simply be moved around and it is all in a standardized format.

By the way, a link to Bud's Blogonaut site also came up on the first page for the same search for "ER diagrams," which I thought was pretty cool.

A test post

this is just a test post