[albatross-users] Web-based SQL record editor?

[Andrew McNamara]

>[A bit OT for the Albatross list, but maybe not.]
>
>I'm looking for something that will allow me to easily whip up simple 
>web pages to edit/delete/add records to an SQL database.  Ideally, it 
>would know enough about Sybase system tables to extract DB schema etc 
>itself without a whole heap o configuration.  Ideally, in python to work 
>with Albatross, but I'll look at other languages/toolkits.
>
>I can't imagine I'm the first person to ask about this, but an hour or 
>two of googling/sourceforge searching only turned up MySQL admin tools.  
>Maybe I just don't know what to ask for.

That's because it's a big hard ugly problem in the skin of a trivial
problem... 8-)

I've looked at a whole bunch of "solutions" to this problem, as well as
having written a few of my own (the most recent of which were done for
clients) - none of them are entirely satisfactory.

The "object-relational" adapters (of which there are several fairly
complete Python examples) are not entirely suitable for use in Albatross
apps - the primary problem being the object life cycle: typically
they deserialise objects from the database and back again, but for an
Albatross database object, you also want to be able to serialise the
object in the session while you're working on it.

The other problem you will trip over is type conversions. For quick and
dirty web interfaces to database rows, the temptation is to expose the
database-object directly in the form - this works... to a point.

-- 
Andrew McNamara, Senior Developer, Object Craft
http://www.object-craft.com.au/