I am doing some research about google maps api, I am trying to implement a map with different categories of objects a according to a button it will display all the locations of certain category. I am using Joomla. I read this tutorial, http://code.google.com/apis/maps/articles/phpsqlajax_v3.html.
It seems doable, but I have some questions regarding google maps. I leave in Ecuador and many streets are not listed exactly. Is it possible to mark a location manually, like dragging the marker? So if it is not positionated correctly it can be corrected.
Also, I have being reading a lot about fusion tables. Is it advisable to use them with Joomla. Will it have any advantage, or it is just another layer to the programming and design. Are mysql and fusion tables mutually exclusive, so if i use fusion tables I dont need to have the same tables in mysql?
Related
I am a business analyst. I use Tableau a lot but have limited knowledge about the back-end of Salesforce. The majority of our company's data is stored in Salesforce and our data team does not support business users for understanding such topics.
In many of my projects, I use the Salesforce connector inside Tableau to extract Salesforce tables, but it requires knowledge about joins relationships among tables. Most of the time, I can guess correctly about the primary key among tables, but I still want to learn systematically about the data structure and have my data independence.
So, how do I learn the data structure by myself? Or how do I ask specific structure questions to data team so I don't trouble them as much?
Do you have Salesforce account with "Customize Application" permission? If you don't have in production - maybe they'll be willing to promote you to sysadmin in one of sandboxes.
If you do - Setup -> Schema Builder might be easiest tool to visualise relations. It's bit old, flash-based but pretty neat way to model relationships. https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/data_modeling/schema_builder
Another one might be workbench, http://workbench.developerforce.com/ It's not as neat but lets you experiment with metadata & queries, learn which object has what child relationships...
For standard objects if you have a primary key / foreign key you can use some lookup tables to learn more about target table. All Account Ids in all SF instances start with 001. Contacts with 003, Users with 005... Combine some blogs like http://www.fishofprey.com/2011/09/obscure-salesforce-object-key-prefixes.html with https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api.meta/api/sforce_api_objects_account.htm and it's a good start. Won't help much with custom objects and fields (specific to your company) but well.
It's bit "meta" but you can query info about tables and columns too. After all - you might be more comfortable in Tableau ;) Querying Salesforce Object Column Names w/SOQL might give you some hints.
If your job is to build advanced reports off these data sources, I would imagine you need to understand the data structure to some extent. This would mean you need to have authorization to view and access the database table list to get familiar with it and possibly run raw queries to verify data integrity.
If they are not comfortable with you touching the production system, ask for access to a development system which is a copy of production or even just realistic test data.
So I will be embarking on designing a dashboard that will display KPI's and other relevant information for my team. Since I am in the early stages of this project and am not very familiar on the technical process behind designing a dashboard, I need some questions vetted out first before I go and shop for some solutions to avoid reinventing the wheel.
Here are some of my questions:
We want a dashboard that can provide live-time information via our data sources (or as close to live-time as possible). What function allows a dashboard to update itself with concurrent datasources? From a conceptual standpoint, I can understand creating a dashboard out of Microsoft Excel, and having the dashboard dependent on the values you may have set within your pivot table.
How do you make a dashboard request information from multiple datasources on its own? Just like the excel example, a user may have to go into the pivot tables to update values, but I want to know how would a dashboard request this by itself and what is the exact method from a programming standpoint? Does the code execute itself every time you refresh the webpage?
How do you create datasources organically? I know for some solutions such as SharePoint BI Center, there are pre-supported datasources like an excel sheet or SharePoint and it's as easy as uploading your document and letting the design handle the rest. However, there are going to be some datasources that I know that will need to be fetched. Do I need to understand something else like an event recorder in order to navigate this issue?
Introduction
The dashboard (or a report, respectively) is usually the result of a long chain of steps. Very much simplified it could look like this:
src1
|------\
src2 | /---- Dashboards
|------+---[DWH]-[BR]-+
src n | | \---- Reports etc.
|------/ [Big Data]
Keep in mind, this is only a very, very simple structure of a data backend / frontend.
DWH means Data Warehouse, where data might be stored temporarily (you referred to this as fetching). This could be a database, could be a Big Data engine, could be a combination of both...
Afterwards, there are Business Rules (BR). Those might be specific rules in how different departments calculate and relate to data, but also simple things like algebra.
Questions
So, the main question should not be about the technology:
What software should we choose?
How can we create a dashboard?
but on the contrary focused on your business processes (see it like a top-down view):
How does our core process look like? Where would I like to measure data?
How would department a calculate sales in difference to department b? Should all use the same rule?
Where does everyone store the data? Can we access it? Do we need structural data?
And, very easy to forget but also easily sometimes one of the biggest parts: Is the identifier of a business object (say, sales id) everywhere build and formatted in the same way?
Conclusion
When those questions are at least in the back of your head and you keep working in this direction, more or less automatically data will spill out at certain points of that process.
Then it won't matter if you use Excel, a small-to medium app like Tableau, Tibco Spotfire, QlikView, Power BI or you want to go full scale with a big Hadoop backend, databases and JasperReports, Apache Drill, Pentaho, SSIS on top of it... it will come out eventually.
TL;DR
Focus on the processes first. Make sure to understand them. Draft in Excel. Then proceed in getting the data and the tools you need to help your use cases. It will work out much better from a "top-down" approach than trying to solve your requirements with tools only.
I've looked through GotReportViewer.com in some detail, but I just can't find enough of a clue to really work out how to do this.
I need to effectively join two datatables (client-side) on a primary key, and show some information from one table in one area, and other (listed) information from the other in another.
From what I read, it's possible (though I haven't managed it yet) to join the tables together to form a third, and use filters to achieve this, although it seems like a lot of work when you're building the datasources dynamically as I am.
Is it possible to generate two datasources that share a key (one implementing the 'many' part of the 1:many relationship), and create a master-detail report that uses both?
If there are any simple tutorials (C# or VB would be fine if I need code) for this I'd appreciate a pointer. There are several unanswered questions here on similar topics to this, which is a worry!
TIA
I gave up on Microsoft's reporting tools, switched to Crystal, and life became a lot easier. Importing an XSD generates a data source, in which tables can be easily linked.
Job done.
I'm experimenting with Dancer some time, and looking for the right blocks to build my application. Frameworks tend to have flat example applications, dealing with one table at time. So I have no good idea which tools should be used to build a little bit more complex CRUD forms.
Let's say I create a Booklovers app. It should have a form to add/edit books with authors. To cover this I need 3 tables in our database: books, authors and books_to_authors. Which is best way to build a form to add a book with authors?
Note:
It is not known how many authors a book may have, we need dynamic adding of rows.
The authors table may have tens of thousands of records, so a select form element is not suitable.
An author may be missing from our database, we need to add them dynamically, too.
All these dynamic parts needs some AJAX. Is there a good solution to integrate it with form creating tools in Perl? I looked at CGI::FormBuilder and am still looking, but I did not find something that could build forms for 3 joined tables as described. The dynamic client-side part also still needs to be covered.
Are there some best practices for such a pretty simple case?
AJAX is for rendering data in a Web browser, it doesn't affect the back-end data storage.
The books and authors tables have a many-to-many relationship, using ORMs such as DBIx-Class can help.
In the Web form, there is a new book and a collection of authors. At the server side, create a book, then add authors to book.
Browse the DBIx::Class cookbook to get some ideas.
Sorry for not providing a simple answer to solve your problem.
Seems it is somehow too complex question to have straightforward solution.
I stick using templates forms and generete dynamic part with different jQuery plugins.
I don't think it is best way, but have not seen better for now.
My little site should be pooling list of items from a table using the active user's location as a filter. Think Craigslist, where you search for "dvd' but the results are not from all the DB, they are filtered by a location you select. My question has 2 levels:
should I go a-la-craigslist, and ask users to use a city level location? My problem with this is that you need to generate what seems to me a hard coded, hand made list of locations.
should I go a-la-zipCode. The idea of just asking the user to type his zipcode, and then pool all items that are in the same or in a certain distance from his zip code.
I seem to prefer the zip code way as it seems more elegant solution, but how on earth do one goes about creating a DB of all zip codes and implement the function that given zip code 12345, gets all zipcodes in 1 mile distance?
this should be fairly common "task" as many sites have a need similar to mine, so I am hoping not to re-invent the wheel here.
Getting a Zip Code database is no problem. You can try this free one:
http://zips.sourceforge.net/
Although I don't know how current it is, or you can use one of many providers. We have an annual subscription to ZipCodeDownload.com, and for maybe $100 we get monthly updates with the latest Zip Code data complete with Lat/Longs of the centroid of the zip code.
As for querying for all zips within a certain radius, you are going to need a spatial library of some sort. If you just have a table of zips with lats/longs, you will need a database-oriented mechanism. SQL Server 2008 has the capability built in, and there are open source libraries and commercial libraries that will add such capabilities to SQL Server 2005. The open source database PostgreSQL has a project, PostGIS that adds this capability to that database. It is here: http://postgis.refractions.net/
Other database platforms probably have similar projects, but those are the ones I am aware of. With one of these DB based libraries you should be able to directly query for any zip codes (or any rows of any kind that have lat/long columns) within a given radius.
If you want to go a different route you can use spatial tools with a mapping library. There are open source options here as well, such as SharpMap and many others (Google can help out) that can use the free Tiger maps for the united states as the data source. However, this route is somewhat more complicated and possibly less performant if all you need is a radius search.
Finally, you may want to look into a web service. This, as you say, is a common need, and I imagine there are any number ob web services that you can subscribe to that can provide all zip codes in a given radius from a provided zip code. A quick Google search turned up this:
http://www.zip-codes.com/free-zip-code-tools.asp#radius
But there are MANY resources to be had for the searching on this subject.
how on earth do one [...] implement the function that given zip code 12345, gets all zipcodes in 1 mile distance?
Here is a sample on how to do that:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/zipcodeutil.aspx
Just to be technical... PostGIS isn't a project of the Postgres community... it's a stand-alone project that is built on top of Postgres. If you want help or support with PostGIS, you'll want to go to it's community instead of Postgres.
You can use PostGIS. Additionally, I've used deCarta's mapping libraries. They have technology which allows you to geokey any arbitrary data type. Then you can query these spatially.
disclaimer: I work for deCarta
Wouldn't it be more efficient to just figure out which cities are within a 1 mile radius and store that information in a table? Then you don't have to do calculations in the database all the time.