[Zope-Annce] ZDataQueryKit - Query Databases Without Programming
Adrian Hungate
adrian@haqa.co.uk
Sun, 13 Jan 2002 21:25:12 -0000
ZDataQueryKit - Query Databases Without Programming
Aims:
The aim of this product is to allow people who are not familiar with SQL
(Or at least are not experts) to produce complex SQL queries from any
combination of Zope data sources.
Objects:
**ZVisualQuery** -- Visually design a ZSQLMethod
ZSQLMethods are powerful Zope tools for querying databases that use the
popular 'SQL' language. This is a complex language which can take many
years to learn properly.
ZVisualQuery does away with all that!
As long as you know what tables you want to extract data from, and
how the tables relate to each other (This is often documented with
the database) you can extract data without the effort of writing
and debugging potentially complex SQL statements.
**ZDataCombiner** -- Visually combine data from _different sources_
*"The sales figures are in MySQL, the exchange rates are in
PostgreSQL, and the personnel data is in Oracle, how can I write
a single query that will conbine all this data?"* - The answer
is, of course, you can't! BUT now you can do the next best
thing! With ZDataCombiner you can take data from _any_ group of
Zope datasources and combine them into a single datasource for
other objects to query.
As long as your datasources have, or can be given, common (Often
called 'key') fields, you can combine the data from any set of Zope
datasources and use it as though it was a normal ZSQLMethod (Or
ZVisualQuery)!
**ZReportTool** -- Visually create simple and complex tabular reports
Once you have your data, you need to display it. This is where
you need a DTMLMethod, and you start getting ready to write complex
**<dtml-in ...>** commands, right? **WRONG**! Now with ZReportTool,
you can simply select the datasource you want to use, select which
columns to display, you can group by columns, and even sum numeric
columns. Hit save and you have a report - Top to bottom, with
no programming!
And a special treat for people with XMLKit installed:
**ZVisualODBCClient** -- Visually design an XMLODBCClient query
The latest version of my XMLKit product
http://www.zope.org/Members/haqa/XMLKit
provides the ability to query an ODBC Socket Server from Zope.
This, finally, allows Zope running on any platform to query
Microsoft ODBC Databases on a Windows PC.
ZVisualODBCClient does for XMLODBCClient what ZVisualQuery does
for ZSQLMethod - It allows query designing without SQL programming.
The output from the method is still compatible with that produced by
a ZSQLMethod, and the objects that call the query can't even tell the
difference!
If this sounds interesting, you can find it at
http://www.zope.org/Members/haqa/ZDataQueryKit
NOTE: This is a first release, although the code has been tested, and is
marked as stable, it might contain bugs.
Enjoy
Adrian...
--
Adrian Hungate
All views expressed in this email are those of the whole world, however some
people don't realise this yet.