I'm a bit of a Drupal newbie but have committed myself to porting some quite complex bespoke websites.
One of these is a surf report site which uses a database with millions of time/location rows to get the local conditions. Obviously can't write this to a Drupal table everyday so am looking for a way to connect and retrieve live data.
I'll need to use the external data in a number of displays which would normally be nodes, views, blocks etc.
The ideal solution would be if the external data just appeared as local data, but I'm guessing that is a rather big ask.
I'm open to any approach. If it involves writing a module some pointers on what to look at (preferably code examples) would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Chris
Maybe you can use the Data module.
From the documentation:
The Data module lets you use database tables that are foreign to Drupal.
You can 'adopt' a table in your database that ordinarily Drupal would not be aware of. This might be external data you have imported, or a table that another application has created.
It also provides Views integration.
I had to show info from a legacy staff databse in my Drupal 6. I have explored three ways:
Importing database rows as nodes in a nightly cronjob
Accessing the external database in my own module
Accessing the external database using hook_views_data()
If I started again I would use hook_views_data(), it's more flexible, specially if you want to match the external database information with drupal nodes.
Best.
Have a look at the Forena module which can be used to display (= query, not update) data stored in databases external to Drupal. It comes with a full suite of Supported database connections, such as MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, Postgres or any PDO compliant variation.
For more details about Forena, 2 types of documentation are available:
Community documentation.
Documentation that comes with Forena, which you can access right after install and enable of the module. Checkout the demo site for an online example of the Forena Documentation.
The Sample reports and graphs are fully functional, such as the drill downs available on the Master Summary with drill down. Using Forena "skins", you can also use the amazing "dataTables" (and its widgets, such as sorting by selected columns).
Forena also includes a UI for either creating your reports (the WYSIWYG Report Editor) and/or for creating your SQL queries (the WYSIWYG Query Builder).
Disclosure: I'm a co-maintainer of Forena.
Related
I would like to create and archive a collection of demo ASP.NET web form applications that show projects with certain features in the sense "this feature can be implemented like this" -- to be presented to a potential customer.
Before the presentation, I would like to get the selected set of demo and install them easily to the notebook. Each of the demos will be "frozen". The target notebook is not the customer's one. It is one of our ones that is bring to the customer for the presentation. This way, it can be prepared in the sense that a named MS SQL instance with the fixed name can be ready, etc.
Can you share some experience with such situation? (I do not want to have marked this question as of opinionated; so please, if you have some explicit links to the related documents or explicit suggestions...)
Here are some other facts and initial ideas:
Each of the demo projects uses two databases: xxx_users (the standard ASP.NET authentication...), and xxx_application (and possibly xxx_external) where xxx is a prefix for the specific project.
The demo application is expected to be compiled (binary only, no sources needed for the presentation).
The Web.config files can use the local\SQLINSTANCEFORDEMOS in connection strings.
The SQL instance has a fixed name, fixed administrator account (like sa) and fixed password for the logging to the SQL instance. This way, it can be included in the Web.config files.
The sample data can be fairly big (not extremely tiny).
The application will use its own SQL tables in the xxx_application database.
The application will simulate the outer database that is accessed from the web application can be simulated by xxx_external database.
This way, I should be able to create and archive SQL backups of xxx_users, xxx_application, and xxx_external databases, plus the archive of the web app binary.
Have you ever encountered this situation? Is the approach reasonable? Could you share some better ideas?
I need to write documentation for several small sqlite databases. Want to describe how the data is used, including table and row descriptions and sample data.
Is it possible to use MySQL Workbench? If not are there any alternatives, or any templates I could work from?
TIA!
Using MySQL Workbench is not possible since, as far as I know, it only supports exporting to SQLite. For a number of suggestions about free database managers you might want to take a look at What are good open source GUI SQLite database managers? - a number of the GUIs mentioned there support report generation.
Definitely far more feature rich, but with a significant price tag, is Navicat for SQLite, which is an excellent database manager with report generation features.
I'm curious if a CMS like Drupal or WordPress is a suitable approach for creating a data-centric web application. It's nothing fancy, but would require a login to access, and essentially have search parameters, results pages, and detail pages. I can program this pretty easily but would prefer to just theme Drupal or WP, since I'm not much of a designer. Thanks for any insight, as well as any examples of where this might currently exist!
-e-
Sure, Drupal is suited for data-centric websites. Development Seed is a company that use Drupal and make data-centric websites but they also use other technologies such as Node.JS. As suggested by Marek Sebera, it really depends on your actual needs and what exactly your site will be doing with the data.
You basically have two ways to integrate your data into Drupal. One is to import the data into Drupal as entities (a generic concept for anything data in Drupal 7) or nodes (a concrete concept for anything content in Drupal). The other is to directly query an external data source from Drupal.
To import data, the Feeds module is a very solid and flexible solution. Out of the box it only supports CSV, Atom and RSS from local files or HTTP. But it is flexible and extensible and there is already many contributed modules that extends it.
To query the data, both external or imported, you can use the Views module to build query pages. For external data source support, you will need additional backends modules and probably have to write your own.
If you import the data as entities, you can also uses the core's EntityFieldQuery to write your own query without using Views. And you can also uses the Search API to index the imported data using a search engine such a Apache Solr.
I am tryin to rebuild a website designed in asp.net.But,being an informative site it has a lot of content in it which i dnt want to input to the database manually.
can ne1 help me out with any drupal module to migrate the asp.net data in sql server to mysql db in form of drupal architecture??
say for example a page in asp.net is displaying data from a form.Can i migrate it in form of cck and get the page data as nodes table.
The comparison table of all available solutions is useful, but I would strongly recommend the Migrate module for this. It should work with MS SQL source data (I've only used it with MySQL and Postgres source databases), and is quite flexible in regards to mapping the source data to the Drupal schema. For Drupal 6, it supports most CCK field types (including images and files), and for Drupal 7 it supports the new Field API quite nicely.
The approach that the module takes, allows you to do continuous migrations such that if your source ASP site is still adding or changing content, it will keep track of what has been migrated, and even allows updating of previously migrated content.
This page have a comparison table of the main modules that may help you importing the data into Drupal. But keep in mind that you'll have some work to do before actually importing, since there's no magical way for Drupal to map the columns of your database to the Drupal columns.
my next assignments is to build 2 information portals for customers. These portals will be login protected sites and contain a set of pages displaying information like orders, invoices, pdf-files ... for the authenticated user (all presented as lists with links to detail pages). The users and the data are stored in an Oracle database. The portals differ in some of the features and in the layout.
My standard approach is to build an individual ASP.net Web Application for every portal.
But this is not the best way to get something reusable. So for these two projects my idea is to create a set of WCF services to get the Data from the Oracle database and to build user controls to display the different elements in Umbraco. This way I hope to get a set of independent, reusable “modules” which can be used to build these portals.
Now my question: is Umbraco a good platform for this type of projects? And is my “concept” a valid approach?
Kind regards
Volkmar
Umbracois very flexible. ON the one hand there is the question about security: With Umbraco you can use any Membership Provider you want for all visitors ( also with member roles).
On the other hand you have the question of the integration: With Umbraco you can create usercontrols, xslts or razor files as macros (which can be seen as the reusable modules).
For Xslt you can implement your own XsltExtension which pulls the external content as XPathNodeIterator you can use in every Xslt macro. For ascx files or razor you can use LinQ2Umbraco, your own objects etc to connect to the oracle database.
You also can use some sort of caching functionality to reduce the db-calls. On the other hand is one of the biggest advantages that Umbraco stores all the content as xml and object tree in memmory. So it is very fast in content rendering. With every database call you are loosing a little bit of this advantage.
hth, Thomas
Ruben Verbourgh began the Oracle4Umbraco project to create an abstracted fork for the Datalayer to support running on an Oracle DB. You can find it at http://oracle4umbraco.codeplex.com/, although it has no active releases, so build from source and YMMV.
Volkmar, your concept is perfectly sound - although you might want to consider using the Umbraco data store as the persistence layer for your data rather than in the Oracle DB itself. You get XML content versioning, caching, and all the benefits of the content-management side of things, in a robust and flexible framework which you can expose to other apps later should you so need to, through the Umbraco APIs and web services.
HTH,
Benjamin
content management of website becomes simplified with Umbraco.
But if you are planning to use Oracle as backend, Umbraco does not have support for it.
So decide carefully as to what parameters can be compromised.
Good luck.