Design advise needed - Dialog2 or Standard Grid

[leetv]

Hello:

I'm tying to decide on the best way to design a grid/feature for my web app.

Overview: I run a company that provides education to various groups. I am trying to develop an 'instructor portal' so that my instructors can enter the courses they have taught, register students in the course, and also enter any payments received for a students registration. I'm not certain of the best approach to design ... i.e. should i use a standard grids/linking or use dialog 2? I get a feel that if D2 is the appropriate method for this then it would appear more streamlined (as i can make use of repeating sections--registrations and payments); using standard linked grids might make it too 'multi-layered'.

Data sources:

• studentInfo (pk sID)
• courseinfo (pk crsID)
• registration (pk rId; sID = student ID, crsID = course id are used to link to respective records in child/parent tables)
  • Payment (pk pID, rID = registration ID linked to registration table)

I've figured out the flow: the instructor will either create a course (or open an existing one). They will then enter students into the grid (either by selecting current students or by adding new ones)--this will also serve to add the appropriate registration record to the registration table. in additional they will then enter any payments made against a registration--inserting payments detail to the payment table.

Based on the above information. Is it best to use Dialog2 for this (an issue I think I foresee is: can you have more than one repeating section in a d2 component, and can d2 components have 'nested' repeating sections.. i.e. payments section nested within the registration section?).

Are they any other limitations, or ideas that anyone can shine a light towards... i'm sure that that is gong to be a long project to create--with very little time to do it in... therefore i'd like to accomplish this as efficiently as possibly.

Thanks
Lee

[gkpurcey]

Re: Design advise needed - Dialog2 or Standard Grid

Hello Lee,

I can give you my opinion, and keep in mind it is just my opinion, and there may be other factors to consider, but I can at least get the ball rolling on this discussion.

My initial feeling is that the dialog may be the best approach for you to edit and enter data, while displaying the data might be best in the grids.

The main reason for this is that with a dialog, you can allow the user to input information before anything is stored to the underlying database, can then validate the information, and then post it to the database. This is an especially nice feature if you are entering data into multiple tables which might have to be entered in a particular order (such as a parent record existing before any child information is entered).


I think I would be most likely to use the grids to display the data, or for data that is only needing to edit or post to a single table, and use dialogs to enter or edit data when there are multiple tables involved.



Just my two cents worth...

Gordon

[leetv]

Re: Design advise needed - Dialog2 or Standard Grid

Thanks a ton for replying Gordon. I'm leaning on the side of dialog2; although likely there will a small learning curve.
I'll give it a good ponder along with waiting to see if anyone else gives an opinion.

Thanks again
Lee

[peteconway]

Re: Design advise needed - Dialog2 or Standard Grid

The dialog2 is the say to go in my view. Remember, the diaolg2 is a super control, so it can host other dialog2's (and grids) within it, this is where you will find it most valuable. Use a SQL back-end and get the results you need to display from views.

[leetv]

Re: Design advise needed - Dialog2 or Standard Grid

Thanks Pete. I appreciate your reply. I'm toying with it now and banging my head against the wall already--just because of the learning curve, and figuring how to place a repeating section within a repeating section (i..e registration and payments together).

I'm using MySQL however... What is the advantage of a view and not a table in this case?

[peteconway]

Re: Design advise needed - Dialog2 or Standard Grid

The view is used to create a collective view of multiple tables that share a common key. A table can only show you a the view of that table.

[2ninerniner2]

Re: Design advise needed - Dialog2 or Standard Grid

Lee -

... or ideas that anyone can shine a light towards... i'm sure that that is gong to be a long project to create--with very little time to do it in... therefore i'd like to accomplish this as efficiently as possibly.

So why re-invent the wheel

Me being the inherently lazy type figured this out a long time ago :)

One of my main apps at the moment is not too far off what you want to accomplish; in fact, it surpasses it. The only item that is not applicable to mine is the payments portion, as my app is designed totally for in-house use by my clients.

As you are now contemplating, I too began with my compass, protractor and radius to create my very own wheel with FileMaker. Long story short, that is how I ended up here with A5 when I needed a top-notch web deployment.

What I am doing is using A5 as the "front end" to the Open Source Community version of a very popular LMS called eFront. It's a PHP/MySQL script in the vein of Joomla!, WordPress, Drupal, etc. All the tables and functionality are already built in; I'm just providing "another way to look at it" as well as additional features that are either available only in their commercial versions or not at all. The payments portion would fit nicely into this category using A5 :)

The added benefit of this method is that you can also offer the actual online training content as it's already there! :) That is what I am doing for the majority of the installs. Others are using it just to track legacy training systems that they already have in place.

Just something else to consider

Cheers!
Lyle

BTW, my brother lives in Avondale, AZ ... nice spot except it's too hot for this "cowboy"! :)

[leetv]

Re: Design advise needed - Dialog2 or Standard Grid

Lyle: OMG! Thx for that information... although it doesn't help me do what i need for this instance of my project, it DOES however, get me the exact product i'm looking for a HUGE launch of new products & courses for my company early next year... BIG THANKS for that info! ..... re az: I'm in NJ right now... AZ is way too hot for me! My house there is south of I-10.

Pete: Thanks for the info. Although, I do realize that I can select multiple tables and pop them in to a view. However, and I guess I'm lacking information in SQL here, if I create a view combining my students and their registrations (in to one view) and then use that view in the d2 component, will it automatically relate the records when a new one is inserted in the d2 component? (i'm going to try it when i get a quick second to work on that project, on a hunch I'm thinking it wont work, but if it does it just answered a nightmare of problems for this and other issues).

[Merlin]

Re: Design advise needed - Dialog2 or Standard Grid

Lee -

What I am doing is using A5 as the "front end" to the Open Source Community version of a very popular LMS called eFront. It's a PHP/MySQL script in the vein of Joomla!, WordPress, Drupal, etc. All the tables and functionality are already built in; I'm just providing "another way to look at it"

Lyle,
Question - when you say "front end", do you mean you're using just the database functionality of eFront, and producing all the web pages in Alpha?
Or are you running both an Alpha server and a PHP server for eFront?

This is a fascinating idea, very applicable to an application I'm thinking about, and I'd love to know more about how you're pulling this off

Kind regards,
David

[leetv]

Re: Design advise needed - Dialog2 or Standard Grid

David,

I use Alpha to register students courses held in eFront on the web. although, (and this is vital for me) I do have a back office application (written in ms access) that ensure payments were made and then gives them access to eFront courses via API.



Lee