Products.sqlpfgadapter 0.1a1

Introduction

This product allows to store PloneFormGen form data in a MySQL database. (It may also work for other SQL dialects also.)

You could also save PFG data in SQL by using a Z SQL Method as an after-validation script, as described in the SQL-CRUD-tutorial. This works, but:

• it’s a lot of manual work, and quite cumbersome for ordinary users

• it doesn’t work with collective.megaphone (see mailinglist-discussion)

The goal for this package is:

• to make SQL storage from PloneFormGen easy

• to also work with collective.megaphone

To achieve this, we create a new PloneFormGen action-adapter. This uses SQLAlchemy (collective.lead) to save the form data to the database.

Installing

Developers

To install a complete development setup:

svn co https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/Products.PloneFormGen/adapters/Products.sqlpfgadapter/buildout/plone3 sqlpfg-plone3
cd sqlpfg-plone3
python2.4 bootstrap.py
./bin/buildout -c buildout-dvl.cfg

If you use another buildout configuration, see dependencies below.

After running buildout, collective.recipe.plonesite should have created a Plone site with id ‘Plone’, and with PloneFormGen, plone.app.registry and this product installed.

Configuration

As a site admin, go to the “SQL Settings” in Plone’s control panel. You’ll be taken to “@@sqlpfg-controlpanel”. Here you can set your database connection settings.

Usage

To save a form’s data in the database, add a “MySQL Adapter” from the “Add new…” menu in the Form Folder. Give it a title and save it.

A database table will be created. Its name is generated (from the Form Folder’s id, among others), you can see it by viewing the adapter object. The table has an ‘id’ column, and a column for each form field.

That’s it! From now on, succesfully submitted forms will be stored in the database.

Limitations

This product is under development. For now, we have major limitations:

• Not all PloneFormGen fields work, notably:

  • file field

  • decimal field

  • rating-scale field

• Adding and removing fields, or changing their names, doesn’t change the database table. Field names for which there is no column will just be discarded.

To do

• Test collective.megaphone compatibility

• Support all form field types.

• Test Plone 4 compatibility;

• Allow updating tables when fields are added;

Compatibility / Dependencies

Tested on Plone 3.3.5 with collective.lead 1.0, SQLAlchemy 0.4.8, MySQL 5.1.41

This product uses plone.app.registry for its controlpanel. In order for it to work, add this to your buildout:

[buildout]
extends +=
    http://good-py.appspot.com/release/plone.app.registry/1.0b2?plone=3.3.5

[versions]
z3c.form = 1.9.0

Changelog

0.1a1 (unreleased)

• Initial release