[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

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