Posted by brucelet on January 27, 2011 at 10:23pm
I'm not sure if it's poor etiquette, but I have two questions on a project.
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I have a content type created with CCK that is primarily numeric data and can properly display it with Views. However, I need to create reports from the data that need calculations (sum, average) of some of the fields. Any thoughts on how to approach this?
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The main site is a repository of many pieces of CCK content (events, news, data) that users are contributing. Some users want/need their own site and would like to display their content from the main site. Other than doing multisites or some kind of wrapper in another install, is there another approach?
Thanks.
Bruce
Comments
Views 3.x has aggregate
Views 3.x has aggregate queries, such as sum. You have to select Group By in the lefthand column and then it will be an option on the fields.
This is actually a good use case for the kind of technologies that I'm working with. RDFa basically makes your Web page your API, making the page queryable. If you are planning on developing and hosting the users individual sites, then multisite might still be the way to go, but using RDF decouples the dependency so the sites can be separately maintained. Can you explain the use case a little more?
Integrating Site Data
Aren't you still in Ireland? What time is it there?
The use case is for sports team management. I have a site that we are creating that will be providing a lot of content for high school and younger sports- teams, leagues, players, scores, schedules, etc. I was going to create content types for all of these and provide a community site for sports information in Western PA. I have a shot at a contract with the WPIAL (high schools) to provide this service for all their teams.
However, we create a number of small sites for individual teams and organizations that would also need access to the data that pertains to their teams. I hate to have them have to reenter it again, so I was thinking of providing some kind of interface (wrapper or multisites) to handle this. Your RDF project sounds like a viable approach to handling this.
To make things a little more complicated, I have been asked by Acquia to create a sports team template for Drupal Gardens under a new partner program they are starting. So, I would need to do the integration with Drupal 7, which may mean I need to build the main site with D7. I wasn't thing that direction yet, as I am not sure the D7 modules I need are ready yet.
What do you think?
Bruce Letterle
Creative Web Technologies
www.creativewebtech.com
Ha, it wasn't so bad... for a
Ha, it wasn't so bad... for a while I couldn't get to sleep until 8 or 9 in the morning, but now it's just 1 or 1:30.
I think Drupal Gardens only supports Simple Views, and I'm not sure what the capabilities of that module are. DG doesn't yet support custom RDF (though for your use case, you might be able to get by with the default RDF mappings). They are open to integrating a module that I've been working on with scor that provides a user interface for custom mappings, we just need to push it to the next level.
With RDF, there are two ways you could architect a distributed solution.
-or-
However you do it, the requesting site would query the source site for data. This could be facilitated either by providing a SPARQL endpoint, which is a read only database of the RDF data on the site, or by querying the RDFa in the page. This can then be pumped through Feeds to create nodes on the target site that are synced automatically with the source site (caveat: I don't think Drupal Gardens supports Feeds, either).
I'll be back in town at the end of February and I think we'll be getting together, so I'd be happy to talk with you more in person about this and demo how it works after the meetup if you like.
Presenting at Drupal Meetup
Lin,
Maybe you could do a presentation on RDFa in D7 at the meetup.
=David
My plan for now
Option 2 seems to be the better option under the circumstances, so I will be building a test case. Here's what I'm thinking of doing.
Master Site- build with full D7 including all the modules you mentioned. I'm not thinking of going live with this for a month or two, so I guess I can live through some headaches while people are working out the D7 issues. I haven't used RDF yet, so that will be a fun learning curve, eh?
DG Site- test using the Aggregator module which allows me to setup RDF feeds. There is also an RDF module, but that appears to be just to publish this site's content with RDF format. Also, the regular Views module will be released by the end of February, so that might help with some formatting issues.
I hope to see you at the next meeting and I agree that it would be an interesting topic to have you speak about the progress with RDF.
Thanks.
Bruce Letterle
Creative Web Technologies
www.creativewebtech.com
Views 3
Isn't Views 3 still in Alpha?
Bruce Letterle
Creative Web Technologies
www.creativewebtech.com
living on the edge
I have friends who are using both views 3 (alpha) and cck 3 (not even alpha yet) and they say they work great. Of course, being in alpha (or earlier) means the schemas may change considerably, so beware...
Yes it is, though I've been
Yes it is, though I've been using it for months now. The UI changes a lot and sometimes I have to post issues for something not working like it should, but the alpha status hasn't proved to be too much of an issue for the projects I've used it on.
Views Calc
Item 1. For D6, the Views Calc module might work. It has not been updated for awhile but 4000+ sites use it so it must not be too bad.
http://drupal.org/project/views_calc
Item 2. Domain Access might work but a D7 solution would be much better.
P.S. Congrats on working with Acquia!
I am looking to do the same
I am looking to do the same thing as Bruce, and seeking options. I'm not sure that RDF will be the right approach for me. But, please do post about what you've tried, and whether it worked...especially if not RDF.