Rails upload a file and render it as an HTML page - html

I am building a website with ROR 3. I need to provide a page to my clients wherein he could edit his pricing info regarding the application. I am quite confused on how to do this. The pricing page needs to be displayed as an html table with different columns which has got the pricing info.
I am thinking of different ways to do this.
1) Allow the client to create and upload an html page and then save it as a file in my public directory and render as an when the client clicks on the pricing link.
2) The clients may not have bare technical knowledge, hence make the client upload some other formats like Word, Excel etc and then parse it and store it as an HTML file in the public directory.
3) Provide the client with some real time editing tools where in the client could edit in a fixed format, and after wards save the file and render it later.
Also, I wouldn't like to store these infos in my database. There would be quite a few number of clients and hence managing all these data in my database would become cumbersome. Storing all these as plain html files and rendering it later would be the most ideal thing for me.
There might be other better steps in doing this as well. Could you please suggest which might the better, or any other option that could suit my needs? Basically I would want my clients to have a mechanism where they could provide there pricing details, edit it later and display it back as an html table, all this without using an Database backend. Any suggestions would be mostly appreciated.

Good way is Excel(csv format).
You can do PHP with Excel. I thing this is the best solutions for your requirement.
Try this.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.fgetcsv.php

If you are give authority to user to change edit contain and you have to used " CSV or Excel" please see these links:
Importing CSV and Excel
Exporting CSV and Excel

If you really don't want to use database then you can use YAML as a structured storage.
e.g. ( you, most probably, could come up with a better structure )
SMS_Pack:
Sl_No:
1: 10000
2: 25000
3: 50000
You can read those .yml files and parse them as hashes. Should be fairly easy to represent that hash as a HTML table.
For the creation, I'm sure you can come up with some dynamic form input. Or to just let the client send this kind of file ( which might not be the best solution ).
But it just might be easier to manage all of this information within a database.

Related

Right way to manage application generated files

tl;dr
In my node.js application I create pdf documents. What is the best/right way to save them? Right now I use node.js fileserver and shell.js to do it.
I am working on a node.js web application to manage apartments and tenants for learning purpose and on some point I create PDF Documents that I want to save under a path
/documents/building_name/apartment_name/tenant_name/year/example.pfd
Now if the user wants to change the building, apartment or tenant name via an http PUT request I change the database but also the want to change the path.
Well both works but I can't write good tests for these functions.
Now a friend told me that it's a bad practice to save documents on a file server and I better should use BLOB.
On the other side google doesn't really agree on using blobs
So what is the right way to save documents?
Thanks
Amit
You should first define a source of truth. Unless you're legally obliged to keep copies of those files and they are not being accessed very often, I wouldn't even bother storing those at all and just generate them upon request.
If not, keep the DB clean, blobs will make it huge. Put them into cold storage (again assuming they are not being accessed too frequently) without those paths. If the paths are reliant on often changing information, that can't be performant for neither the file server nor your system.
Instead store a revision number in your DB that the file can be found under and limit the path structure to information that rarely change.
Like {building}/{apartment}/{tenant}_{revision}.pfd
That - depending on your backup structure - will allow you to time-travel if necessary and doesn't force a re-index all the time.
Note: I don't know too much about your use case.

Where to save users comments of an item?

Basically I have a web app which it contains items and the people can comment on it and tell what they think about it. just like youtube videos or any other similar website.
Question
Where is the best place to save these comments. Do I Create a table in MySql database and save it there or do I save it in a .txt file and then save the location of the file on the database. I would really appreciate if someone tell me which is good from performance perspective or is there any alternative better way.
Much appreciations.
Save the comments directly in database.
Adding a comment in file and saving the path in database is not good you are adding extra work.
Reading from database is easy and more professional as every where it is in use. In YouTube as well.
There is chance someone delete your file and you will lose your data.
Clearly the database. They were build to replace the unpleasant storage of data in flatfiles also for performance reason.
You need to save the comments in the database. It is easier to query and sort the comment later on. Despite save as .txt, it is safer to save it in database.

Suggestion About Creating a Web Database Application

I am new in web developers world. I have created a website (www.formsify.in) on Wordpress all by learning on internet. I know the basics of coding and programming languages, etc. and the interest so I learn quickly. Now my objective is to let users search and download documents (.pdf). The way I dl it now is by uploading the documents in Media and use buttons to navigate to the page which displays documents in a tabular form.
Now, this works if the documents are less in numbers. But I know the number of documents will increase and it will be very difficult for me to deal with uploading them one by one and creating tables all the time. So I thought to create
(1). Database of documents
(2). Uploading interface
(3). User interface
I want suggestions whether I am thinking in the right direction or can there be a better way to accomplish this. And if this is a right way to do
What database shall I use keeping in mind that I the documents to be stored online so the database should be online.
How should I go about creating the uploading interface keeping in mind that I am not a code-geek.
How shall I be going to design the user interface.
I know these are very wide and open questions. Also because stalwarts here will give me a non-commercial, non-biased view. I just need directions. I was able to create a decent website (as per my standards) when I didn't know much the only thing drove me to do that was that I was hellbent. I will be thankful for any suggestions.
Thanks,
.farhan
So, basically, you should have 2 tables:
User
Upload
User hold an ID and whatever information you want to have on the user and the upload table holds a unique ID, a user ID (of the uploader) and a path to the document
This way, you can select the uploads (add filters if needed) and you can construct the tables and views using the database results
The uploading is a simple html form that will send the file to a php script that will upload the file to a folder (rename it as well) and insert the new path in the dB.
The user interface just needs to hold a bit of html, with a form element and an action to a php script to handle the upload.
You can find the upload script on w3schools, just add the mysql insert to the database.

Advice about storing searchable documents with tables and images in MS Access Database

I have a huge MS Word file I use for personal notes but I want it to be more flexible. The file is made from short articles (600 words) with date, title, sometimes a table or some images. I came up with the idea of separating the single articles an put them in Access, to extract them from the database with queries, add tags, sort chronologically.
One big question is: which format should I use? I tried Access 2010 Rich Text Edit but it doesn't show tables, and I don't know where to store images. My idea is to store images outside the file.
Another thing I tried is to store the files as HTML in the database directory, but when I try to add some interface functionality I encounter problems with the most trivial things, like making VBA open the associated file. I don't like storing outside Access also because I don't have full-text search.
The primary requisite for this application is that it must not be cumbersome: it's a prototype I want to use to see if my model of storing notes works, so I don't want to spend a month programming an user interface, and if I note any defect at runtime I must be able to switch to design mode and fix it in minutes. If I want to write something, i don't have to worry about HTML syntax but I want to be able to add some simple table or image.
What I finally search is a HTML viewer in Access interface that receives an HTML string (composed by a query) and displays it.
At this moment I'm considering to remain with my MS Word file because switching seems too complex, although I don't like the sequentiality of articles and the hierarchy of chapters/subchapters, which made me think about this Idea.
The answer to all those problems was Evernote, which is like a Wiki you can edit quickly also from a smartphone, with or without an internet connection, which syncs to a master version on an Evernote server and without the constraint of having to invent a title for every page/idea.
If I had a huge Word document like yours, I'd probably split it into individual files and use something like dtSearch.

Notes database to MySQL (with CF?) / or how to get the NSF-datastructure

I have a commercial ColdFusion application, running on a MySQL database. A possible new client has approached me, they have been working in a Lotus Notes environment (and their own database) for many years now. Ofcourse they want to migrate their data to my application, before making the move.
I'm trying to get a grip on how to get a thorough feeling of the data, structure and interdependencies in their current database-application. Are there any tools to see a database-structure (like in a RDBMS) of a NSF-file, or is there anyway to dump the structure using ColdFusion etc....I don't have any handson experience with Lotus Notes (I do in the meanwhile have a local Lotus client and their database).
I need a good startingpoint to be able to determine whether or not I can find a way to migrate the data.
Any ideas??
thanks
Bart
To get at the data in Notes, a good option is to use NotesSQL which can be found here:
A quick overview of the Notes data structure is this: Notes is a document-centric database, with non-relational data contained within each document. Notes Databases (NSFs) contain any number of Notes Documents, which in turn contain any number of items that hold data. Each Notes Document can have a different set of items, and thus different data in it. While that sounds like a horrible mess, usually the documents have similar data based on the form used to create the documents.
This all leads to why there is no simple way to get data out of Lotus Notes. There are a few other options, which may or may not be useful depending on how much data you have to migrate.
I personally like using XML to extract data from Lotus Notes. You can do so by creating XML views within a Notes database. IBM has a tutorial that looks helpful.
Using Java or LotusScript, you can write code to extract data from the documents to any format you wish (CSV, XML, TXT, etc)
If it's not a lot of data, you may find getting the data into an Excel format is the simplest intermediary step. Long ago I wrote an add-in tool for exporting data from Lotus Notes to Excel, which may help you. Or you can use the "Edit > Copy Selected To Table" feature in the Lotus Notes client to copy what is visible in a Notes View to the clipboard, and then paste that into Excel. In that scenario, you'd want to edit the views so they show all the data you need.
I hope this helps!