Create DB to store company listings - sql

So I am looking at creating a very small app for the town I live in, I would like to offer people the ability to log into a website and create a business listing that would have things like (name, address, phone, opening hrs, logo -image).
I have limited knowledge in sql and creating Databases but am able to with abit of reading and time.. However I would like to know the best approach for storing images.
I am planning on just uploading the image to the webspace and then having a URL link stored in the DB... But not really sure if this is the best option?
So my question first of all, is this the best way to go about it? secondly how could I achieve this?

You've got everything right.
Yes, go for the plain table in the database, contains all the required fields.
Upon inserting another company data, get the autoincremented id, extract logo's filename extension and move uploaded file into a file called "$id.$ext" and you're all set.
How to achieve it - just try some online manuals.
There are plenty on working with database, while handling files is better to learn from the man page http://php.net/manual/en/features.file-upload.post-method.php

Related

How to programatically retrieve information from organisation directory?

Background- my organisation have a global directory. The Active Directory only stores the employee numbers and employee name. No information about the role title is stored in Active Directory. (I have already built an LDAP query to retrieve all the information from AD, retrieving the role title is my issue).
On our intranet, there is global directory, which shows the role title. Now this is obvious to me that the role title is stored in some other database.(not AD)
I am wanting to write a script (not sure what to use), to pump a list of employee numbers in the search box and retrieve the role title.
Is this possible? I've never scripted anything to retrieve information from results coming from a website/intranet etc. Any guidance will be appreciated, LDAP queries unfortunately was not the right approach for me as the organisation does not store role title in AD. (I have thousands of employees to find and I don't think it's practical to search individually)
Gemmo
I take it you only have access to the front end of this system. It is not ideal, but the only way would be to use web scraping. That is, parse the HTML from the web page.
This method is time consuming to put together and very prone to breaking since it is entirely dependent on how the data is presented on the page. If anything changes, your web scraping can break.
But if you will only need to do it once, it might be worth it. A tool like this one could help you do it. (that is just the first one I found online. There are others, just search.)
But since we can't access this site, we can't really help any more than this.
Web scraping really is the absolute last resort. Any other way to get the data is better than this. Maybe you could even ask the administrators of that system to give you a one-time report of just the data you need to see. As long as they're willing, there's no reason they couldn't give you an Excel spreadsheet with the data.

Automating the process of creating doc word

I have a .doc template I use for building CVs for many friends.
I'm trying to automate this process using simple library/program, for exmaple, that can accept data like name, email, phone number, job title, and can create the .doc automatically.
What framework can be used for that to make it fastest i can?
Thanks,
Tal
Where exactly are keeping this template and are your friends plugging in the data or are you doing it all yourself?
No matter what, you're basically looking to do a data merge. An example of a data merge is a mail merge:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/294683/how-to-use-mail-merge-to-create-form-letters-in-word
The same thing really applies to what you're accomplishing to do.
You can take a template, specify the fields that require variable data (aka the different information that's changing), and then just use a spreadsheet to pull the data from and plug it in.
Now the question you'll probably be wondering next is how data merges use spreadsheets. The way data merges work is that each column you set with data in it, that should correspond to the changing lines in your template. I strongly recommend you read up on this further - it's not that difficult to do once you get the hang of it.
The last question is probably how you'll compile the data into this spreadsheet. Are your friends going to fill out an online form perhaps? If so, you'll need an online form of some sort perhaps, so you'll need to use some PHP, have a database to store the information from the form, and then just go to the table and export the information as a .csv file after you see you have enough data populated in your database table to do a data merge.
If you don't have access to MS Office, I'm sure you can accomplish this in OpenOffice.org instead (which is free/open-source).
Hope this helps.
At my job we do data merges all the time - for mail merges, for letters that need to be personally address to individual recipients, and we do this for people who need to print dozens of different business cards for different employees. We take their business card template and just do a data merge from a spreadsheet to save time on needing to set up individual files. P.S. you can also use Adobe inDesign for this, if you know how to use it.

SharePoint groups and shared libraries/lists

This is going to be vague, hopefully not annoyingly so. I know very little about SharePoint, but I'm asking for someone who's more knowledgable but is under lots of crippling pressure. Unfortunately I'm going to be held responsible for the project (it's due before Christmas!!), so I need to see what I can figure out on my own to help out. Please allow my desperation and helplessness to excuse any problems with this question.
We've created an InfoPath form that generates xml files that will be uploaded to SharePoint. The data from these files will be aggregated and used to generate reports. The biggest issue is that the users will be spread out over three locations, and the info generated from each location needs to be firewalled from the others. But we need the xml files from all three locations to go to the same place in order to make the aggregation feasible with minimal manual work.
I've read something about SharePoint groups (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262778%28v=office.14%29.aspx) and figured that might be the way of doing it, so long as 1) the xml documents could all go to the same library/repository and 2) that shared repository would only show each group their own documents. For at least two users we also need a master view that shows all of the documents regardless of the group that created them.
That's the main question. Ultimately we'll also need a similar way of storing the generated reports (tables and charts) to the creators of the xml files AND a set of users at each location who won't be able to view or create those xml files. But first things first, I guess.
Is this possible and feasible? Any hints/links that could get us started down this path?
I think in your case the best option is to create a folder for each group, and set permissions on them to allow just the specific group of users to access that folder. The same with a separate library for reports. Then, you'd just setup a list view that flattens the folder hierarchy to view all items at once.
You could also set per-document permission programmatically in an event receiver, however, there's a pretty low limit (search for ACL) on the number of unique access control lists per library (it's 50.000 actually). So depending on the number of XMLs you are going to manage you may reach this limit.

Is it possible to store and retrieve objects created using Objective-C? (in a database, for use in iOS app)

I'm working on an iOS app that creates "location sets" where each row contains a location name and a GeoPoint, and each set has its own name. Each of these sets are stored in an object inside our program (all belonging to the same class). Now we want to give users the capability to create sets and upload them to a database, allowing other users to access and download them to their device.
I've been looking in to back-end solutions for work like this, but pretty much everything I've found so far focuses on relational databases and adding and deleting rows and using SQL-like language to retrieve them. Is there a way to store these objects just as objects (and not unpack the info inside to tables), and then retrieve them? It feels like that would be a much simpler way of going about this.
I'm an absolute beginner when it comes to databases, so forgive me if there's info missing here that you would need to help me out. I'll make sure to keep checking back in case someone asks for more info.
Thanks!
Coredata might be useful for you as its based upon the entity. So you can play multiple things around it by using queries (predicates).
But if you just want to save and retrieve back, then as a simplest solution I would suggest to create array/dictionary with entity data, save that into NSUserDefaults so you can retrieve back same while re-launching the app.
Webservices for iOS development:
raywenderlich
icodeblog
WSDL Webservices
Response data parsing, it would be either JSON or XML:
JSON Parsing
XML Parsing
Hope these links would be helpful for you.
I ended up using Parse's mobile back-end service. That was the type of service I was looking for. I've found other similar services since then, like Applilcasa and StackMob, but we're pretty happy with Parse so far.

Is storing Image File in database good in desktop application running in network?

I recently came across a problem for image file storage in network.
I have developed a desktop application. It runs in network. It has central database system. Users log in from their own computer in the network and do their job.
Till now the database actions are going fine no problem. Users shares data from same database server.
Now i am being asked to save the user[operator]'s photo too. I am getting confused whether to save it in database as other data or to store in separate file server.
I would like to know which one is better storing images in database or in file server?
EDIT:
The main purpose is to store the account holder's photo and signature and later show it during transaction so that teller can verify the person and signature is correct or not?
See these:
Storing images in database: Yea or nay?
Should I store my images in the database or folders?
Would you store binary data in database or folders?
Store pictures as files or or the database for a web app?
Storing a small number of images: blob or fs?
User Images: Database or filesystem storage?
Since this is a desktop application it's a bit different.
It's really how much data are we talking about here. If you've only got 100 or so users, and it's only profile pictures, I would store it in the DB for a few practical reasons:
No need to manage or worry about a separate file store
You don't need to give shared folder access to each user
No permissions issues
No chance of people messing up your image store
It will be included in your standard DB backup
It will be nicely linked to your data (no absolute vs. relative path issues)
Of course, if you're going to be storing tons of images for thousands of users, I would go with the file system storage.
I think you have to define what you mean with better.
If it is faster my guess you don't want to use a database. You probably just want it plain on a file server.
If you want something like a mini-facebook, where you need a much more dynamic environment, perhaps you are better of storing it a database.
This is more a question than an answer, what do you want to do with the pictures?