Database advice

Question

Hi,
I know database questions have been asked quite often here
and I've
searched through previous posts and found some valuable info.
But just
wanted some extra advice.
I'm building an aplication that's made of parts. First, you
have the
database management program. This is relaltively simple -
just names of
people with related data for each person. The user can open
this
application, choose a person and change his/her info. The
user can also
add a new person. The information needs to be saved. I was
thinking this
is easy enough to do with Director and saving to an external
text file.
My second application displays a person and his/her info on
screen and
reads this info from the external text file. This application
is a
Director file. These are both done offline.
So, my question is what adivce do you have on this? Should I
just stick
with a text file. Should I make it a database? If I go with a
database,
what's the most simple one to use?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Most of the database xtras come with a database management
program. For
instance, I know that both Valentina and Arca have dedicated
programs to
adding, changing, and otherwise manipulating the data in the
database.
If you don't want that, it is pretty easy to write such a
thing, since
all the database xtras have Lingo functions to read and write
to the
database, so you can make a simple program that is just an
interface for
changing things.
Making the other part of the program to just display stuff
from the
database is even easier.
It may be easier (and definitely cheaper) to not use a
database per se,
instead just use Lingo lists. It depends on the quantity and
types of
the data. If you just need it to store name, address, phone
number, and
photo of <1000 people, and the photo portion can be an
external image,
then a Lingo list is the way to go. I just made that 1000
number up,
there is not real cutoff, but after a list gets real big, it
can get
difficult to manage. I have heard of folks using 10000 item
lists
without problems.
You can make a program that manipulates the list pretty
easily using the
Lingo commands setAProp, addProp, and deleteProp (check the
help files
for more details on those commands)
gPersonInfo=[:]
gPersonInfo.setAProp(#mike,[#email:"[email protected]",#photo:"mike.jpg",#phoneNumber:" 999-999-9999"])
put gPersonInfo[#mike]
-- [#email: "[email protected]", #photo: "mike.jpg",
#phoneNumber:
"999-999-9999"]
put gPersonInfo[#mike][#email]
-- "[email protected]"
In this case, I only have info about 1 person. But you can
use setAProp
to set info about as many fols as you want. And if all of the
photos
are in for instance, a folder called "photos" under the
folder that the
Director project is in, you could use a command like this on
a bitmap
sprite to display it *this one is Windows only, if you needed
it to be
Mac compatible, then make sure you can use Mac foldername
converntions,
(i.e. colon as folder delimiter instead of the backslash):
global gPersonInfo
on changePhoto me, vPerson
thisPersonPhoto=gPersonPhoto[vPerson][#photo]
sprite(me.spriteNum).member.filename=the
moviePath&"images/"&thisPersonPhoto
end
That function will cause the photo to change if you send it a
command
like this:
sendAllSprites(#changePhoto,#mike)
As far as saving the database to a file, there are loads of
xtras that
can do it, the best ones, I think is propSave (which is free)
or vList.
In fact, now that I think of it, I believe that both of them
can save
image data into a list, so you may not even need to keep the
images as
external...