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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