Is there a module that can display a half dozen or so fields from a single chosen table with a small handful of generic sort and filter options? I'm looking at setting up our PTA site with a list of books for a reading program where the parents (or kids) can filter by grade level or book points and sort by title or author.

Thanks,
Ben J

No-ah could do the job perhaps.

I was trying to do a discography in this, but i'm too stupid to do it :)

Link anyone?

I looked at No-ah but haven't yet grasped what it does. Any good samples to see it in action out there?

hhttp://tetrasi.com/noah/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=57&forum=19

I wonder if the posts from that support site were saved. I can't find one person who tryied to build something in NoAh on this XOOPS website.

NoAh just flat out rocks from my understanding of it...

http://www.streetfighter.ca/demo/

Now if I could team up with someone we could build a module based off of NoAh...

NoAh does look interesting. It seems to add a layer in between the database and your module that makes it easier to do complex database tasks. At least, that's how I understand it. I have not worked with it.

You may be interested in our Formulize module:

http://dev.xoops.org/modules/xfmod/project/?formulize

Formulize is a module that lets you build generic forms and reports based on the data users have submitted to the forms.

You could make a form that would let you enter all the relevant information about the books (title, author, target age group, number of pages, subject area, whatever you want...). You would give your webmasters group, or some other admin group, the rights to view and add entries to that form, and also admin rights over the form (to allow you to publish reports on the data to other users later on).

Then you would fill it up with entries, one for each book.

Then you would write some reports based on the data in the form. So you could write a report that showed all the books where the subject was horses, sorted alphabetically by author, or by ascending number of pages, or whatever.

You would save and publish each report as you made it. The report would be published to whatever groups contain the users who need to review this data.

There is detailed reporting documentation available for download in the Formulize area on dev.xoops.org. There is also a template patch that might be suitable for you which turns off the ability for just anyone to write reports on the data.

For more nitty gritty details, I suggest reading through the forums and tracker entries in the Formulize area on dev.xoops.org, particularly these threads:

http://dev.xoops.org/modules/xfmod/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1180&forum_id=745
http://dev.xoops.org/modules/xfmod/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1239&forum_id=745

Good luck,

--Julian

Thanks for the info Julian.

I also have Formulize installed. It really is exciting times. Being able to do these things with XOOPS is very promising.

Is there a way to display the data I have collected useing formulize in "drop down boxes" or maybe you call them "combo boxes" ?

Quote:

Hi there, I'm glad to hear you have our module installed. I'm not sure what you mean by "the data I have collected". At this point, reports are simply just filtered and sorted summary lists of entries, so you can't encapsulate report results in a dropdown list (though the available reports do appear in a drop down list on the View Entries page for each form).

You could link directly to a report by putting the URL into a module like iMenu, or something else navigable. Although users without permission to view that form and report would be rejected when trying to follow the link.

Perhaps if you elaborate a bit on your situation in a support tracker item, or a forum posting, in the Formulize area on dev.xoops.org I will be able to suggest something more on point.

Take it easy,

--Julian

Okay Julian I will do that later this weekend here is alink that has alot of "combo boxes" When I installed your module this is kinda what I wanted to do.

http://www.uneedapart.com
or
http://www.junkyarddog.com

I can elaborate a lil more later...

Ah, user specifiable filters. Yes, that would be very cool. The only way to do that right now would be to pre-create all the reports you needed (and if you allow the users to specify more than one filter at the same time, then you start to multiple the individual possible reports A LOT).

Then you would have to create a UI for the dropdown boxes in a custom block, or a shell module or something like that (a block probably wouldn't work actually, because you'd need to evaluate the state of the boxes on submission, so a blank module would be the way to go).

And then you would simply have the logic that evaluated the boxes reload the page with the appropriate predefined report. That's why you would have to predefine the reports, because you would need to essentially link to the URLs for each report based on the selections users made in the dropdown boxes.

In such an application, you would probably not even want to have the form menu visible to most users (only the ones who can actually submit into to the DB). Most users would use the custom UI you made, and have access permission to the forms, but not be able to navigate to them, except through the custom UI.

An interesting and advanced problem. I will put a note about this in the feature request tracker.

--Julian