Except I can't seem to find out exactly how to do that. Could someone point me in the right direction?

thanks, phil

-- Contributors: PhilGodfrin - 15 Jul 2008

Discussion

No worries Phil, I had the same problems in the beginning.

Check out TWikiForms, FormattedSearch and TWikiTemplates and see if this helps. Also Check out TWikiApplications and the Sandbox as it has a showcase of existing apps.

Tipp: In general it is better to ask such question in Support since this is the place for these kind of questions.

-- CarloSchulz - 15 Jul 2008

It can be confusing, as "database applications" in that phrase does not mean "Applications backed by a relational database system". The whole database is built on the text files that TWiki uses to store the topics.

If you want an example of the kind of applications that can be build on top of TWiki, take a look at what we use to control issues, which can be found at

http://develop.twiki.org/~twiki4/cgi-bin/view/Bugs/WebHome

Which is implemented using BugsContrib. All the information is stored in the TWikiForms that are stored in the topic text files.

After you build your first TWikiApplication, you may be interested on taking a look to DBCacheContrib and FormQueryPlugin which allows a TWikiApplications to scale to thousands of topics.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 15 Jul 2008

I'll use support in the future... I did look at TWikiForms and did not get satisfied - but that's probably 'cause I'm thinking of an application backed by an rdbms, not the TWiki database. So - I will keep reading.

Basically all I want to do is use a form to read and write a dbms - is the TWiki environment good for that sort of thing?

-- PhilGodfrin - 15 Jul 2008

(btw - what an awesome application TWiki is!)

-- PhilGodfrin - 15 Jul 2008

I'm not sure what you want to accomplish. Are you thinking about using TWikiForms as the "screen" to capture data to be stored in a RDBMS? If so, they cannot be used for that.

If you want to develop a more RBDMS-centric application on top of TWiki, take a look at DBIQueryPlugin and DatabasePlugin. Couple tem with a plain html form to capture the data, some topics to display it and some parametrized includes (see VarINCLUDE) to ease the maintenance, and you have a quick-and-not-so-dirty TWikiApplication.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 15 Jul 2008

thanks Rafael - I'm not sure either My intent is to use TWiki for collaborative documentation. But I saw the TWiki forms and I thought that it may also serve as an easy app front end. Nothing complicated mind you - all I'd want to do is have say four or five fields for the user to fill in, and then have that data inserted into a dbms. So... TWikiForms is not for that.

But - the two Plugins you referred to - now that may do the trick. Thanks...

-- PhilGodfrin - 15 Jul 2008