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Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

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Use a database on a website

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    Use a database on a website

    I am fairly familiar with Alpha5. I am also fairly familiar with designing and maintaining web sites. I want to upload a database that I have created in Alpha5 v4 to be accessed on one of my websites. I do not understand what is involved. I have read all about ODBC, in Alpha5 help file, but everything I try does not seem to work. Can anyone point me to a "cookbook" approach to getting this done?

    Thanks,

    Earnie B.

    #2
    RE: Use a database on a website

    Hello Arthur,

    If you want a dynamic web site where users can view the actual records in real time you will have to use a server side scripting language/environment to do this such as ColdFusion, ASP, PHP, Java, etc. You can use these products to link to the dbf files for display/input on the web. This is not trivial.

    If you just want to display subsets of your data, you could export the data to an ascii document file, word, etc and display this document on the web site, but there would be no interactivity available. Some here have created html report documents from within A5, but again this is not dynamic.

    Coming version, A5v5, will have built-in html reporting capabilities, but again this does not give you dynamic interactivity with the tables.

    Good luck,
    Jim

    Comment


      #3
      RE: Use a database on a website

      This subject comes up fairly often on this board and future versions of A5 promise to cure this current problem. That being said... there is a discontinued product that Alpha once developed and marketed known as Webfiler. I developed a considerable number of online databases with it and as a matter of fact just built one with it this week for a new website we are working on.

      It reads A5V4 files directly and still can be quite useful for applications like we are using it. This is a query only online Db we just built, but we have built many others that are totally interactive. Feel free to check it out if you would like. I suspect when Alpha does release another online database tool it will be similar in many ways and I sure look forward to seeing and working with it.
      Webfiler, in it's current state, does have it's limitations, but it sure is a sweet product as well, and one that I hated to see them discontinue development and support of. Especially after spending $3k on the developers / hosting license.

      The temporary location of this site in development is at http://www.crimestop.com/csi . Click on the "Programs" button to perform a search on the Alpha database using the Webfiler engine. This site will soon reside at www.c-s-i.org .

      -Kevin Anderson
      Anderson Software

      Comment


        #4
        RE: Use a database on a website

        Kevin,

        I am curios on how you get the Alpha Data out to Web.
        What do I need to accomplish what you shown us at the
        Crime Stopper's site.

        I only need inquary-read only data like you.

        Your explanation is greatly apprecited.

        ken Tjia

        Comment


          #5
          RE: Use a database on a website

          Hello Ken,

          Since the database server sits at my office and we only update the Crime Stoppers member file once a month... I simply copy the file over the network to that server. We have a dedicated Webfiler / NT server connected to a T1.

          We have had instances where we had an Alpha based app running on the desktop, and users on the web, sharing the same data file.

          I could host other people's Alpha database's for webfiler use but it would mean they learn how to code their pages to work with webfiler, which is really not very hard if they are fairly proficient with html, and that they upload the database to our server. So, it would not be possible to share a database with the web, and locally, if it were hosted at our office. Never have done it and keep thinking Alpha will come up with a new package that is similar to webfiler, but more robust. A true client-server engine. I think they will as soon as possible.

          -Kevin Anderson
          Anderson Software & Internet

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