Thread

Good Monday Morning to Everyone!

I have been looking through the forums to see if I can glean information about how to best deal with tables inside of an entry.  (I am not talking about table-ed layout.  I am talking about tables used to present tabular data.)

Here is a table that I need to use within an entry.  Is the best way really to set up a custom field group with 40 custom fields?  Even if that were the best way to do it, it is so cumbersome to try to input the data into the entry because, with 40 custom fields, they just are so difficult to read on the entry form!

What is your method for inputting/updating information that will be in tables in its finished form?  Best practices?  Advice?

What I would do is create a weblog with custom fields for the different sizes, and then put in ‘Natural Beige’, etc. as weblog entries. That way you can be flexible to add more columns (or rows) as needed. Make sure that by not filling in a custom field automatically generates the N/A.

One of our upcoming projects has something similar in the pipeline. We’ve been thinking of using the Multi Text plugin by Mark Huot. It might do the job for you too.

Maybe Mark Huot’s Multi Text extension would do the trick?

Oops, beat me to it.

Thanks for these responses guys!

I guess that I am just a gun-shy with the use of plugins.  I know, community development is one of the things that helps make the end product better.  But I don’t like how it adds to the complexity of updates.  SO I try not to use them if possible.

So is the only native possibility to use a LOT of custom fields?

When you say 40 fields are you saying one field for each cell in the table?

Yes, that’s correct.

I am using this table to feed links over to phpCart, so I need access to the individual cells.

Why not set up a separate weblog with 4 fields and enter each of the 10 items as a single entry. Then, use the reverse-related entries tag to bring in those entries within the main post and just format them as a table within that tag pair.

The sorting will take some special care as all EE fields are text, not numerical. I’d probably use the title field for that…
product-01-5x7.5, etc.

I am going to have to think about that one for a bit.

The table that I have above needs to be related somehow to weblog entries that contain a product entry.  Hmm.. That’s not very clear.  Let me try this:

I have a master weblog that contains my products.  These products have the above table that is the same throughout each of the product categories.  I just want to be able to relate the products to the table so that I don’t have to retype it for each of the product entries.

There you go.  Clear as mud.

Ahhh

For all the flexibility EE offers, sometimes it is a formidable challenge to get it to do what you want it to! :gulp:

So, the question remains - What is the best way to deal with tabular data in EE?  I suppose it depends on what you need to do with the individual cells.  In my case, I need access to each one individually.  That means either a custom field or a global variable. 

What if you don’t need to get to each cell.  Mark’s extension is a possibility.  Or just including the html inside of a custom field would do the trick as well.

As it is, it often seems EE is a tough place with work with tabular data and in fact DB’s in general. I bounced a similar topic around in here for a long time, even posting a job board posting, and what I got out of all of it was that perhaps creating a completely separate table in EE, and then using php and mysql, would be the best solution. In other words, only use EE for certain parts like login and perhaps some queries and display.

But even that does not seem easy as I am not familiar with how to use all the control structures to make certain people are logged in, etc.

I bought EE for the discussion forum alone, which I think is one of the best out there. I also now like using it for publishing articles and a little wiki. But I do think that some project (perhaps mine, perhaps yours) are harder to do inside EE than outside. But the advantages of login are what is stopping me (so far).... I may just build the entire thing outside of EE and then get some pro help in making the EE login and cookies work with it.

Still thinking…So, that table relates to one product? How many products do you have? Are the sizes standard across all products?

Still thinking…So, that table relates to one product?

Yes, it relates to all products in category A.

How many products do you have?

Within each category there are about a dozen products.  There are a total of 5 categories.

Are the sizes standard across all products?

The sizes and prices are standard within each of the categories.  So there would need to be 5 of the price/size tables.

Thanks for looking into this!