Anders - if you get this working, do let us know (with any relevant
links). It'd be good to show the world... I worked for some time on
disability/technology/art projects, and I know at least one large UK
network of users that would be interested - DaveE
Hi,
I need a little advice about maintaining state in Camping.
I use NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software for most of my
work -- I don't have happy hands -- and I've been creating little
Ruby projects to make it easier to do some things by voice. I'd like
to build a UI for them. After some painful experiences with some
windows-based UIs, I'd like to try using Camping – it looks like
fun, and I can use my HTML/CSS skills to make something pretty.
For most of these little Ruby projects, I don't have to store
anything in a database because the data is already being stored
elsewhere. For example, I'm managing a team that's building a
Microsoft-based data warehouse that uses Excel pivot tables as a
front-end, and pivot tables are hard to manipulate using
NaturallySpeaking. On my Camping site, I want to be able to display
a long list of the available pivot table fields so I can click on
them by voice. I also want a text box so I can say, e.g., "show
department and unit by row, year by column" or "only show fields
containing committee." So all I need to store is the info I'm using
to manipulate the pivot table: the connection to the Excel
worksheet and a list of the available fields that I grab from the
Excel worksheet plus one or two properties about these fields. I
don't need to save any of this info -- I grab it once at the
beginning of the session, and I don't want to cache it because, for
example, the list of fields will change depending on which data
warehouse "cube" I'm connecting to. I have other projects where the
data is stored on a website/application that I'm grabbing/
manipulating using Web services/APIs. In short, I don't need to
permanently store any data, I just need to maintain state for a
relatively small number of objects.
What's the easiest way to do this in Camping? Is there a way to
cache the list of field objects? Or does it make more sense to store
them in a database and purge & refresh the data in the database each
time I start up the Camping site?
Thanks!
Anders
PS Maybe you're thinking, "using Excel pivot tables as a front-end
to a data warehouse??" It does sound bizarre, and I was pretty
skeptical at first, but it actually works pretty well. Microsoft has
put a fair amount of work into turning Excel pivot tables into a
pretty decent data warehouse front end. And since you're just using
Excel, you get all the goodies are built into Excel. Not a good
front-end if you are creating straightforward dashboards that are
totally locked down, but if you have a pretty broad range of fields
and you're encouraging folks to slice and dice the data themselves,
it ends up being easier than most of the other tools out there.
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