Monthly Archives: March 2017

tableMaker: Open Source PHP MySQL CRUD GUI library (Updated!)

1 minute, 56 seconds

I have to admit, one of the utter joys of my job is that they encourage me to open source software I write at my day job.  After looking high and low for a PHP framework or library to do a basic MySQL CRUD GUI, I gave up.  While phpMyAdmin is the longstanding champion for full featured DB administration, it’s way to complicated for an end user looking to just add a row right quick.  There seems to be an amazing project called CrudKit (great name!), but it has this one, massive blocking “feature”:

prevents usage in MVC frameworks
commit 047807d01f

This is, literally, what I was trying to do. I spent a some time seeing how hard it would be to contribute to CrudKit to get the feature I wanted working.  I ultimately decided that a bespoke solution would more quickly achieve my desired goals.  That said, if you do want a stand alone app, do check out CrudKit.

While I suspect it could use some rewrites to not have silly-long arrays passed as arguments, I’m quite happy with my results: tableMaker. This guy takes this PHP:

$tm = new tableManager(DB_SERVER, DB_USER, DB_PASS, DATABASE, TABLE);
$rowsArray = $tm->getRowsFromTable();
print $tm->getHtmlFromRows($rowsArray, "/edit?table={$tm->table}&id=");

And turns it into this HTML:

If you want to render a fully functional edit form with dynamic client side error handling and table sensitive validation rules, just run this PHP:

$row = $tm->getRowFromTable($_GET['id']);
print $tm->getAddEditHtml($row, 'edit', "/save?table={$tm->table}");

Which will output this responsive, nice looking HTML:

Two big features of tableMaker are it’s simplicity and it’s security*. Yes table maker can do whiz bang client side sorting, but it also can output tidy, HTML compliant tables.  Yes, we can make your browser download 100k+ of web fonts just to render an “X” when you have an error in your form, but it can also do with out all that noise – implementers choice!  Security wise, tableMaker abstracts away all the complexity while ensuring there’s simply no way for you to expose yourself to a SQL injection attack. (* We need some nonces).

Along they way in making this, I see all the cool kids are using Composer.  I’ve earmarked this guy for my next project!

I’m really happy to have been paid to write this library; I’d be even happier if some else on started using it! I’d about piss my pants with glee if some opened a PR ;)

Update 3/18/2017Issue #3 on tableManager has been closed – CSRF protection in place!  Go Nonce, go!