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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 3/18/2017 – Issue #3 on tableManager has been closed – CSRF protection in place! Go Nonce, go!
Let’s get this out of the way upfront: the most recent installation of the Star Trek reboot, “Beyond”, was exactly what I’d hoped it would be. It was an action packed, summer fun movie. It did not exceed, but definitely met my expectations.
In the end of the move (yes, like I said, spoilers) the Enterprise crew is rocking the 
