Access View Translation Data Sqlite Server

Ok, to tackle your final questions once and for all, and plow through the last of the updating so I can get this work off my desk! captcha "Some people might find this additional step annoying, and its only necessary if you are super paranoid that someone will try to hack in by "brutal force"" I don't think we'll need this, at least not at the beginning. as long as we make reasonably strong passwords I think its OK. But is it something we can add later if the Directory becomes wildly popular?

Not a problem. Simply requires adding a script to a php page. Captcha is set up for php too, but I'd obviously have to fiddle with it a bit to figure it out.

sqlite on your server I think I already answered this that the server does support. (some of these might be duplicates, I went far back into the emails to make sure I cover everything). re: sqlite on your server "Do you want to give me access to your web so I can peruse the possibilities, or how should we address this?" I sent this to you already, did you use it?

As I explained, it was only access to phpmyadmin or something, which I believe is a simple admin console that works for a mysql database, not sqlite. This is why I think your dude doesn't know what I'm talking about. sqlite is different than mysql, and the access that he gave me was almost shockingly piddling for a server. ftp and phpmyadmin is absolute basic access. You should see the toys I get to play with on my new server. even my old.

re: re: sqlite on your server "Don't you have a regular login account for your webhosting package? I'll check it out, but like I said, I'm going for the new hosting account anyway. Will start with the 4/month package, with only 10gigs of space (should be plenty for start). Will migrate all my database stuff there. They obviously support mysql too, if needed. Worst case scenario, would you object to setting your dbase on another domain?" I gave you the only logins I have, if you need something else I will have to talk to Dave to find out what it is. I want to keep it all on my domain on this server. I guess the package you bought has features will allow easier configuration or something? I need to have it all on my domain. If you can't get on or need to know more let me know and I'll get you all authorization/access from Dave.

You could also switch your domain to my server, as part of my package or your own, as I once wrote. Or I simply have to learn mysql but charge more, as I wrote.

re: re: re: sqlite on your server "just checked it out and, yah, looks like the standard mysql management window. I noticed the "Add database" is locked with zero permissions, meaning that you're only entitled to a single database. Which would serve your purpose fine, but just shows that it would not suit my own purposes, since I want to be able to set up many databases etc. I have a feeling your tech guy doesn't know what he's talking about when he says it supports sqlite. Anyway, rummage it through your brain. If you want mysql I'd be tempted to slap on another 200bucks as I mentioned. It will require a lot of learning and piddling. But we can judge all that once the job is done I guess. " well I want whatever you say I need, I haven't gone on my own to read up on this stuff. You said before that sqlite is good enough for what we are doing, I have shown it all to you so there is not going to be a sudden massive expansion or big surprise of a bunch of stuff you don't know about. I know Dave doesn't know what he's talking about but when I asked he was with the tech guys and they confirmed that the server does indeed "support sqlite" which I think is all you need. I just want to keep it with my site.

Well, just ask him the questions I asked about the root directory thing, mention that it's different than mysql, and then I can just upload my scripts to your server and see if they work. I've already managed to get my scripts working by NOT putting the dbase in the Root directory, which came as the standard package. So if I/you don't have access to the root directory, we can just try uploading the scripts and see if it works.

online! (without quotation marks) "okay dude, check it out: http://translationstop.com/keta/search.php There's no link to it from anywhere, so there's no way someone can stumble on it. In any case, it's only a small excerpt. I'll be working on it occasionally and improving it. Read the instructions.doc file in the zip file I last sent you for further instructions. " already sent you an email that I messed this up, ready to look at it whenever its re-reset.

I don't think you messed it up, since I didn't press the Reset weblink. Try the username and password I sent you.

RE: field sizes "Then again, don't know how often you think it will be necessary to make such edits. If in the future you expand to include mills in the US and the rest of the world, which really wouldn't be a problem, because sqlite can certainly handle tens of thousands of records without the slightest problem, the clicky boxes would increasingly pay off because you wouldn't have to constantly piddle with and maintain the database, as they can become a headache as they grow. Eventually you can add the "application form", as I mentioned, and new mills would fill in the info themselves. You wouldn't necessarily be interested in manually punching in a Japanese mill, but they might be interested in doing that, and it would only make your dbase more valuable." I think we should go ahead and put the boxes. I really think it will be much more efficient far into the future. If you say its just a bit of work for you to set up initially, some extra time, extra cost for me, but not a big deal as far as running the database or whatever then let's go with that. I am sending you the other three mill type forms from the other computer in a second so you can see what the products lists are. Will zip them.

don't think I received it yet.

Okay, I'll start on the clicky thing AFTER I confirm that sqlite works on your server, or you decide to switch to mine, or you decide I go the mysql route. Cause if we go the mysql route I'll have to write the scripts differently, so I don't want to waste my time setting it up for sqlite.

RE: field sizes "Perhaps after you decide about the 2bornot2bclickies you could tell me which fields you want visible on the web. To protect your data from copy/paste, you could show certain key ones, as teasers or something, whereby to view the rest the person would have to click on Details, which would take them to the Individual Mill form. For them to copy data from those forms they'd have to copy/paste each field separately, so utterly tedious if you consider the number of mills that I can't imagine anyone going through that process." The key fields to display should be: Company Name, Mill Type, Address, Location, Phone, Fax. Basically its what they could get from the Yellow Pages. Then they have to click further into 'details' as you say, and can see the entire listing in all its glory. And hopefully an ad as well, that I will be selling once this is up and running!

okay, just to make super sure that we are on the same page, cause this is not making too much sense to me. There are two views: List view, and Form view. The List view shows all the records at once, where the Form view shows the details of each mill separately. Basically how I have it set up in the Access I sent you. In either view you only need to display the information (fields) you want to display. You can even set up different user rights, for example for those who pay more, to reveal certain fields only to certain people.

Now, for list view (the one where people could copy/paste all the records at once - at least those records where the fields are displayed), I don't see the great benefit of showing the fax number etc. I believe the List view is better to show comparative statistics, like perhaps the 1x3 data, or the overall production capacities, and location and stuff. But I'll certainly do it as you want, no probs, just wanna make sure you understand what's going on. And if you change your mind in the future, its really not a problem to show an extra field or more in the list view, or less. Simple html stuff practically.

RE: field sizes "One possibility is you offer them a forum or something where they can post comments themselves. I'd even suggest that." for now I will just leave it at them emailing or phoning me. It's very valuable for me to talk to them one-on-one, I can possibly sell them a subscription or an ad. I don't need it to be super-automated, once it is up its not like the whole world will contact me at once about their listing, it will just be a relatively mellow ongoing thing. But something I'm not sure we talked about, rather than a secret password for them to update their listing, will there be some kind of password so they can VIEW their listing for free? Let's say for four days after I send them an email notifying them of the existence of this Directory. So they can see it and let me know if there are changes. Easy? Difficult?

It's a separate process but I can set it up so that they have a username and password to VIEW (not edit) ONLY their record. They would see it in Form view and not see data from any other mill. I don't think you would need to give them access for only four days or something, because it's really not that great. But if you wanted you could just delete their username at any point and then they would not have any access.

If you want to give ANYONE access to all the records you can just create an account/username and then erase it later whenever you want. I already set up the admin login account, where you can see the users, add more, delete some etc.

login progress "phew! That was a struggle. Finally figured it out, but inevitably I learned a lot in the process. And such a login function is quite important, as I'm sure I'll be using it on a lot of my other forms. You can check it out at: http://translationstop.com/keta/dbase/search.php The username and passord to enter that "dbase" folder is the usual keta, margabooda:" was able to log in and see this, no problem. Can't look at my own yet of course because I am a bonehead.

actually, now that you've entered the administration account you can create your own usernames and test it out. At the moment I have it set up to send me email notifications whenever a new user is added, but this is real easy to switch over to you. When a new username is added, an email is sent to the administrator (at the moment my email address) AND the new user. The new user has to confirm the weblink to activate the account. So just create a new user and put your own email address to see how it works. Then you can delete it as the administrator. You'll be doing this in the future so might as well practice now. No harm in erasing and creating new accounts and experimenting.

zipped database file will send comments in a separate email . . . noticed something funny happening with the email and website fields, some are landing in the next entry, some aren't showing up. will continue looking very carefully and reply in a second.

I'll examine it when I get it, and should be able to fix things quickly. We'll see. k

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I believe the List view is better to show comparative statistics, like perhaps the 1x3 data, or the overall production capacities, and location and stuff. But I'll certainly do it as you want, no probs, just wanna make sure you understand what's going on. And if you change your mind in the future, its really not a problem to show an extra field or more in the list view, or less. Simple html stuff practically. " hmm, yes good point. man, let me think .. . . I think locations, plus lets give them the phone number, then the Production capacity. They can quickly see the mill size generally to weed out either the tiny ones or the huge ones depending on what they are after. Besides, that's what the German guy's site is doing!

Yes, precisely. I'd say the phone number is not necessary in List view either. It's like you'd think the users will see all phone numbers at once so that they can call them one by one and spend a day doing that. Will they want to do that, or is it just a once in a while thing? I think the List view should be for comparisons only. For example, they can sort the List view according to production, or number of employees. It should focus on "comparative statistics". Then, when they see something they like, the click on Details and that particular Mill or Wholesaler or whatever opens up in a separate window, showing all the contact and other details. I can set it up so that it opens up in a New window, leaving the List view open. Like webpages which open up in New Tabs, for example. So they don't have to press the Back button etc.

What I suggest you do is to play around with this in Access, which is one of the big reasons I made it and sent it to you - to play around. Otherwise, heh heh, it might be the case of the woman telling her husband to move around the furniture, and then changing her mind, AGAIN, to make it look differently. Just open up a Form or List in Access. Lets say "General Query" in the Favourites menu. That is a List view. Once its open press File > Save As, and call it lets say "General Query - online", and make sure to keep the type as Query. Now it should look exactly the same, and you can simply erase those columns you do not want. Or you can right mouse click at the field header the column and press "Hide Column". You can resize the columns by making them wider, you can left click on the column header to turn the column black (selected), then left click on the column header again but not let go but drag it left or right to a new location, letting go once there. Real easy stuff. This way you can play around with things so you can SEE what it will look like online, before I actually start to make the online form. If you want to get super fancy, you can go into Design view and drag some more fields from the top big box to the bottom strip. It's easy enough. You cannot damage the underlying table or data because this is a Query. You cannot damage my other query (list) because you've just created your own. Play around and experiment, no worries. I think you should learn this stuff anyway, cause I assume you will be playing around with it a lot eventually, drawing up data while people talk to you on the phone. I'll slowly teach you a lot how to play around with the data. One step at a time, but I think you'll see the power of this offline baby.

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just woke up and already my mind is whirling. Actually, in the last moments of my dream you were comparing my system to an ad you saw printed out on the outside wall of some store, where they were pushing to have everything done in Excel. I explained how I could easily duplicate their bells and whistles with my Access etc. and then you were all jumping with glee.

Anyway, the ideas:

- like a dummy boy who thinks about nuclear engineering and can overlook the very obvious, it occurred to me that you might want the Form part looking like the pdf application forms you sent me. Well, duh, that is so easy. I can make it look exactly the same, with even a little line to show the page break. This can be done in both Access and online, as I figure you know how to do it in Dreamweaver. The only difference with the online version is the following:

<form action="message.php" method="post">

Enter your message: <input type="text" name="msg" size="30">

<input type="submit" value="Send">

</form>

where the <input name="value1"..>

woud become $value1 in sql speak. Easier than shittin' after bran flakes and yoghurt.

- secondly, I was contemplating the possibility of ditching Access and do everything online, instead of updating the data offline and then uploading the sqlite file after conversion to update the online data. I can make the input form to match your pdf application thing, and then Save As that html input form and use it to Read the data, so it looks the same. I even stumbled on a neat little feature that can spit out pdf files through online commands. On the other hand, I've had problems in the past copying data from tables from the web to offline Excel, for example. I've had the best results copying from a later MS IE into a later Word, and from there copy the table data into Excel.

In which case, perhaps Access could be useful, if you want to send little snippets of info to journalists. Heck, here's an example. But your email program would have to handle html or rtf or whatever:

My translators sometimes worry about getting paid and how much I owe them and if I don't have my head deep up my arse. So I open up my Access, open up the dudes records, and do a quick copy/paste directly into my email program:

Sometimes though my email program gets a bit finicky, so I could paste it first into Word, erase some columns maybe, resize columns, and paste that into my email program:

Hmm, this later version of Word is doing something different. Anyway, you can screw around with it to find the perfect match. Or course you can save the Word file and send the attached file. Or spit out a pdf file from that (I have software for that, or you can buy it if you are averse to using the PC - but I gather you have pdf producing software on your Mac).

As you can imagine, the translators immediately shut up and have the greatest faith in me.

Another option is I get my Siberian dude to do some of his Visual Basic (for Word, Excel and Access) magic to create a button which automatically spits out the sqlite dbase file from Access, or alternatively imports the data (updated first on the web) into Access. We can go either way, but it would be better to know this first before I start developing everything.

Otherwise, I know some manual procedures how to import/export between sqlite and Access. Not very long, but a few steps and can be a little tedious. A button would be nicer, but in the past sometimes I would have problems with compatibility issues between different versions of Access, where the button would work on his but not on mine. In which case upgrading to the higher Access version on my shitbox might be required.

These are just ideas, but I'm going to have to pay him something for his help on this project. Such as the script which helped convert the data from rtf to Access. Without his script we would have been spending a LOT of time manually converting. I'd like to charge separately for his tasks.

- and there was a third idea but it slipped my mind by now. I'm sure it'll come back later.

Okay, off to work! Excited to get the script working on your server (assuming it will work) and continue working on your project. Last night I completed the transfer of data about the treeplanting companies and have it in sqlite, so I'm ready to proceed to the next step of putting it online. Exciting times!

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okay, your techdude fixed it and now I got full steam ahead to work on your scripts again. I know exactly what permissions to give the folders etc., and I think he had to switch things to Apache or something. Anyway, I achieved a good milestone with my treeplanting database but now I'm learning a lot to make the next step. Fascinating stuff, and learning about loopdyloops and mathematical functions within them. Sky's the limit it seems. Last night another mini project occurred to me. I have a webpage explaining about time and which I made to help make sure my transators could deliver their work on time:

001yourtranslationservice.com/kenax/Translators/Resources/TimeZones.htm

Actually an interesting article about how we developed our concept of time, and it's high up on google in certain keywords, and tends to get half decent traffic. Anyway, my plan was to add some functionality at the top: a table with two rows, the top one being the time zone of "your" customer and the bottom one your time zone. For the bottom one I'm going to try and get fancy and let the website guess where your time zone is and already set that one, but there is an option to override it, and I'll try to get cookies going so it remembers you. I already once stumbled on a website which does this. Then for the top row you choose what time zone your customer is on and punch in their working hours. I'll try to program it to take into account all daylight savings. Anyway, on the right side of each row will be a nice analogue looking clock for each of your own time zones. I guess I'll make a little box if they give a certain deadline. Can even be another deadline, if they say, for example, 3pm GMT time. Your row will then tell you exactly when your time that would be due. I'll add this to my list of examples on my CV page, and then I'll see if this added functionality will increase traffic, considering people might bookmark it and use it more often, both of which gives good scores for google.

Anyway, back to your stuff, we need to sort out the following. I'm gonna spend today setting up your scripts so they're operational, put the scripts somewhere more useful than in a Keta folder (I just copied it all from my own system to see if it would work before I started to screw around with anything), and throw the dbase out of the public html folder so no one could hack in and steal it. I'll get the login scripts goin and all, and then I'll continue with development. I finally went to the internet cafe and installed IIS, so now I can try to get Perl running on my system and play around with those import scripts from my Siberian programmer. But before that we need to sort out any of the bugs you mentioned. I'll try to analyse the data as well.

1) Figure out the import bugs and where you said things were not aligned properly. I'll work on examining that as well.

2) Quadruple confirm that you want the clicky boxes, because this is going to be a major operation, and may require a new conversion script to break up the fields into separate ones (although I'm hoping that I can use the previous Perl script and modify it or something).

3) If you want the main search file (its temporary location http://madisonsreport.com/keta/search.php but that will soon change) in a particular location now is definitely the time to speak up, cause restructuring and moving stuff around is a major pain. I started a folder dbase, was going to put search.php in that, and then a password protected folder Admin in the dbase folder, where you can add and delete users etc.

Off to work!