Ben, per our email exchange, I am posting what I ended up doing for the benefit of others. Thanks for your thoughts and your contributions to Form Tools. I'm sure I will use it sometime soon for another project.
This is what I ended up finding for my project above: I used PHPmyEdit.
http://www.phpmyedit.org/article.php?download
You enter the name of the database that you want to create forms with (where your data is) enter the db username and password and it creates the php file ready to roll with browsing, sorting, edit/updating, inserting and deleting. It's ugly but highly functional and you can mod that php code from there. Especially good if you are prototyping like I am.
Assuming that you have all of your data in an excel file:
So five minutes to import an excel file natively (or export to CSV first). Then import with PHPmyadmin to create a database. Two minutes to create the forms with phpmyedit and you have a functional site. A general note, take the time to remove all minus signs from sheet names, and columns. Use lowercase and underscores to make them readable. This will save you a lot of time. Also, name some extra sheet columns if you get an error for duplicate null columns during a csv import. Likely there is data that didn't export properly due to double quotes in a text field (making the import think it has extra columns). I actually ran into that. A simple solution was to create a couple of extra column titles (named anything like A B C D) then you can sort by those columns to clean up the data. Anyway, it's pretty easy if you know the tricks.
For a reporting tool I have found http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/intro/ but have not tried that yet. Soon.
Cheers!
This is what I ended up finding for my project above: I used PHPmyEdit.
http://www.phpmyedit.org/article.php?download
You enter the name of the database that you want to create forms with (where your data is) enter the db username and password and it creates the php file ready to roll with browsing, sorting, edit/updating, inserting and deleting. It's ugly but highly functional and you can mod that php code from there. Especially good if you are prototyping like I am.
Assuming that you have all of your data in an excel file:
So five minutes to import an excel file natively (or export to CSV first). Then import with PHPmyadmin to create a database. Two minutes to create the forms with phpmyedit and you have a functional site. A general note, take the time to remove all minus signs from sheet names, and columns. Use lowercase and underscores to make them readable. This will save you a lot of time. Also, name some extra sheet columns if you get an error for duplicate null columns during a csv import. Likely there is data that didn't export properly due to double quotes in a text field (making the import think it has extra columns). I actually ran into that. A simple solution was to create a couple of extra column titles (named anything like A B C D) then you can sort by those columns to clean up the data. Anyway, it's pretty easy if you know the tricks.
For a reporting tool I have found http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/intro/ but have not tried that yet. Soon.
Cheers!