This group is intended to help Drupal become a good platform for building complex, data-driven applications. We help application developers explore and learn how to use Drupal to model complex data structures, build data-collecting and reporting systems, and manage ongoing development and maintenance. We also provide suggestions and guidance for ways that Drupal can be made more suitable for this purpose than it already is.
If you're wondering whether Drupal can handle things such as:
- Foreign key relationships
- Code tables and modifications to codes
- Complex input validation
- Forms that allow entry of record type "x" or "y"
- Large numbers of records
- Complex reporting requirements
- Other things a corporate client might ask you to do when designing a data-driven system
...then this is probably a good place to discuss it.
how would you get paid to give advice?
What Defines a "Data-Driven Web Application"?
The following is a collaborative list of features that define a data-driven web application. (Admittedly, the phrase "data-driven" sounds like some stupid sort of buzzword, but it's the only thing I can come up with that seems to fit.) Such applications can be UI, back-end, or middle-tier features. The current focus is just to get a list started. How can you tell that a web application is "Data-Driven?"
- Ability to create "entities" and relate them to each other ("foreign key relationships")
- Many inputs restricted via drop downs ("code sets")
What this group is about
For nearly 2 decades (yes, hard to believe but it's been that long), I've been developing database-oriented web applications. At first, it was using Unix shell scripts and Perl, then I entered the corporate world and ended up using Microsoft's ASP and SQL Server. Later, I graduated to Java, Oracle, and Postgresql. In the last decade or so, I took a sidestep into PHP and MySQL. So I've been around the block, so to speak.
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