Using DaDaBIK to create a PHP CRUD Database Front-End without coding

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Contents

Introduction

Features

Screenshots

Other features

Typical uses

Tutorial

Conclusion

Introduction

Writing CRUD database front-ends and simple database applications is a very common task that almost all PHP developers need to implement. It is usually a simple job to accomplish, but is also time consuming, boring and error-prone to implement.

Software developer’s tend to avoid time wasting and repetitive tasks in favor of more challenging tasks. This lead to the development of applications with the goal to automate front-end development.

History

DaDaBIK is one of the precursors of this kind of applications for automated creation of PHP front-ends. Released initially in the year 2000 by myself, Eugenio Tacchini, the project continues to be actively developed until today.

The project’s long history of development allowed it to reach important goals in terms of stability and popularity, with hundreds of thousands downloads, adoption by big organizations, and translation of the application to 17 languages thanks to the help of many volunteers.

Features

The time you need to finalize your work obviously depends on the number of tables involved and on the level of customization you need, but a simple front-end for inserting, updating, deleting  and searching records can be ready to use for you or your users in a few minutes.

• The label
• The HTML input type (a textbox, listbox, file upload, etc...)
• The allowed content (alphanumeric, numeric, e-mail, etc...)
• The possible values, eventually taken from another table (“foreign key” support)
• If the field should be to be displayed and in which forms
• Etc...

Screenshots

Customization of a form field

Results page

Other features

Other features include master/detail views, export to CSV, checking for possible duplication during  insertion, authentication and authorization restrictions on view, update, delete actions, e-mail notifications.

DaDaBIK uses the ADOdb and the PDO database abstraction libraries in order to support as many types of database systems as possible. At the moment it officially supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.

Typical uses

Before using DaDaBIK many users ask about eventual similarities with PHPMyAdmin. These two applications are actually very different. DaDaBIK was not created to provide complete administration of a database, but rather to allow the creation of a customizable and user friendly database applications.

For an example of the latter, see the World Oral Literature Project by the University of Cambridge.

Tutorial

For a complete tutorial I have produced this video that gives a live step by step demonstration on how to use DaDaBIK to build a common CRUD based PHP database application. This is the first episode of a series of video tutorials about DaDaBIK available on YouTube.

Play Video

Conclusion

Further information, documentation and instructions on how to download the application can be found in the official DaDaBIK Web site.

If you have other questions not answered here, feel free to post a comment on this article.