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.
Related
I am interested in allowing users to "share" information on my website, say something similar to a bulletin board concept. This is something I've never done before because I know that it could introduce security issues.
I'll likely be using ColdFusion as my scripting language. I'm also familiar with PHP, but am leaning towards CF because of its built-in RichText control. The database back-end will either be MySql or SQLServer.
And so, my question boils down to this: What are the specific security issues and how do I screen user input for them? Does the method of SQL storage have any barring (say VARCHAR vs BLOB)?
We actually use a CMS for the primary pages of our site, and the heart of it uses a database vs actual files on the system. So for most of the content on our site, we actually have HTML which is being retrieved from a database.
For example
blurb.body will equal something like '<p>This is a body paragraph</p>'
Then one thing we seem to run into sometimes is a character encoding error. It seems like if someone copies some text into the CMS with a " ' " or something, there isn't anything that will convert it automatically to a '.
But yes, you should be able to do it. Just make sure whatever filtering you do going into the database is reversed correctly on its way out.
Is there any good way to migrate existing database from Domino Server to Relational database like MySQL without using any tool.
I've explored a bit about this and got to know that its possible using XML but don't know how and what'll be the procedure.
Any help would be appreciated.
Without using any tool: NO.
There are two big difficulties in exporting data:
First is the Notes Richtext, which is a proprietary format that has to be "transcoded" somehow. This is not an easy thing to do "manually" and needs either a lot of coding or some kind of tool.
Second is the fact, that there is no "forced" structure in Notes documents. There can be several forms that "define" how the documents look and there can be different versions of these forms that have been used over the past. A document may or may not contain any number of fields in any thinkable type (the field may even be number in one document and text in the other).
You have to KNOW the structure of your documents to get them out. Of course you can simply export them as "Structured Text" or as "Comma separated values", to get -most- of it, but then you need views that show the documents in the order you need them. Exporting them as XML is another "standard" way to get the data, but then you need to understand the xml to get it into your relational database.
Short: Without (at least very little) coding knowledge OR a tool (that costs money) there is no chance for getting the data out.
Ah yes, there is an "ODBC driver" for Lotus Notes / Domino, but that will not help you much, if you do not know the structure of your documents and how Notes- Databases work, it will also not work.
As Torsten said above, you can't do it without a tool, either you buy one or write one yourself.
I wrote a tool like that several years ago to export Notes databases as XML. There is a bit of work, especially with the rich text fields. You also may want to export/detach attachments and embedded images.
You can read more about my export tool here: http://www.texasswede.com/websites/texasswede.nsf/Page/Notes%20XML%20Exporter
I have a MS Access 2013 file that I am using. There are two possibly related concerns. For some context, this is an MS Access 2013 file with some forms and some tables and a bit of VBA for the logic of how those two interact. For versioning, the file has been copied and pasted with a datestamp on it for the newer version.
The first concern is that all the file sizes for the various files is exactly the same, even though data has been added and some changes to the forms were made.
The second concern is that when I right click on a table and go to table properties, it says "Shortcut to Table (Local): table_name" where table_name is the name of the table. It appears that this is a shortcut to a table somewhere, but I'm not sure where. The forms are also shortcuts to forms, but I don't see the destination form in my file anywhere, even after unhiding system objects. My questions regarding this are: how did this happen (I was assuming it had something to do with the fact that I copied and pasted the file) and where is the file that these are a shortcut to?
Everything seems to work fine, but I'm concerned that if one of the legacy files gets removed that I might lose some data. Is my data being stored within this file, or did it get split somehow and the data is being stored in a different file somewhere? I just want to have a better grasp of what exactly is going on.
I feel like I have a good handle on the SQL and a pretty good grasp of the VBA, but the MS Access specific nuances are something I'm still gaining familiarity with.
Well, it seems it was as simple as changing the view in your navigation pane to something else than custom!
I've got a lack of understanding at the moment. I'm developing a website with many articles and instead of creating a .html page for every article, I thought about storing the text into a database and get it from there (somehow) again.
I'm totally unsure if it is the common way to store text in a database. How do all of the "big" websites handle the mass of articles they publish? They won't create single pages neither but instead using a database, I guess.
But how can I achieve this? How can I store whole html files with divs and jquery and stuff into a database and get them when clicking on a link? Might XML be a keyword?
First of all, you need to clearly understand how things should work.
Clearly the approach of creating a page per article cannot work for multiple reasons:
if you have a huge number of articles you'll need to have a huge number of pages
if you need to change something small in design, you'll need to make that change for every single stored article
What you need to do is to create a more generic page, which has all the common stuff for all articles in it (a place for title, a place for content). The articles themselves can be stored in a database. When opening a page for a specific article, your application should place the title and content in the right place in that page.
This approach is universal _ it will work for any number of articles.
The keywords you are looking for are : Dynamic, Content Management.
In order to achieve this, you should learn a scripting language, PHP for example.
You will find a lot of tutorials to get started and how to make your website a bit more dynamic.
But you were right about the database part, most blogging systems and other content providers use databases to store all of this in data tables. PHP (and some other languages) would allow you to interface the database and the content you provide to your users.
You should look into using a web development framework like ruby on rails. Rails has templating that essentially let's you define variables inside of your html (e.g. "text of article").
As for storing the text of the article, the way I do things like that is to store them in a file on my server and then fetch that file using AJAX and then insert into an html file.
Most sites accomplish this by having templates, in which the common-to-every-page html is stored in a file. Page-specific data (article text, etc.) is stored in the database and "inserted" into the relevant parts of the template before returning to the client.
download word press and check how it work! it will help you
http://wordpress.org/download/
I've looked into SQL 2008's built-in Full-Text search, and also Lucene.NET.. but I don't think they'll do what I need to do. And I just want to make sure I'm building my program as efficient as possible.
So here's the dream. I want to have a single textbox on a page (like google) and allow the user to enter ANYTHING in. And based on their text, I will search 10's of tables to find what they're looking for.
Example. My database contains thousands of locations, each of which have multiple names / codes. Within each location, there is tonnes of data associated with them.
So if the user wants to display all the locations with the codes that contain "VM" ("CD-VM01", "CD-VM02", "CD-VM03", etc).. they should be able to. Or if they want to find all the locations in Toronto, they just type Toronto.. I want to make the search as easy as possible for people. (I've found that people don't like thinking)..
Plus it ends up being easier to scale to more search options if I can just search the database, and not have to add new fields to a search screen.
So if I don't use Full Text search (which I can't for partial) the only thing I can see that i'm left with is "Like" .. is that right? is that my only option?
I guess the question is, even if you were able to do this in the database, how would you handle it in the UI?
Most likely every search result from a different table will have different attributes that need to be displayed in order for the end user to understand what it is.
The Google search box only needs to search one thing - the content of web pages - and return one type of result - web page URLs and excerpts. Fundamentally you are trying to search for many different things, and so you'll most likely need to handle each case separately.
Alternatively, you could maintain a denormalized search table that contains only the search text and the common attributes you think need to be displayed with each hit. Maintain it either with a scheduled task or with triggers. You'd be able to use FTS on this as well.
Update
Some of the comments express some uncertainty over what SQL Server Full-Text Search is capable of. FTS can most definitely search for a single string anywhere within the text of a column, and can do other things as well (proximity search, free-text search, etc.) If you're just getting started then I'd recommend the TechNet pages on the subject, the documentation is very comprehensive.
In particular I'd suggest having a look at the section on Configuring Catalogs and the Getting Started page (Cole's Notes: you have to create catalogs - writing CONTAINS queries without them won't get you very far). Then take a look at the querying page. I'd be very surprised if you can't find answers to any and all of your questions there.
If you still can't get it to work, I would post a new question with the specifics of your problem - what you've tried, what you're expecting, and what's happening instead.
I believe Lucene does exactly what you're looking for. You can add an index from any external data source (including multiple database tables), then query that index and you'll get back pointers to the matching records.
The drawback is that unlike with full-text indexing, you're responsible for building and maintaining the index yourself.
You can see an example of how Lucene.NET might be used.
It appears that the easiest / quickest solution for this exact problem would be to use LIKE.