What have I been up to over the last couple of days? Well I was trying to understand the ASP.NET MVC framework and how it works. I have been hearing a lot about (seeing/reading a lot about?) the ASP.NET MVC framework and wanted to gauge whether I should switch over to MVC framework for my latest project. After all, its supposed to be more maintainable, supports TDD and gives you greater control over the html which is generated. Plus my friend who will be helping me with this project is a java developer and the web application to him means MVC.
However, having seen a couple of videos where a sample data driven application was built using MVC, I realized that for now I am sticking with webforms. I am just so used to it that it will take time to switch. And I don't have the time. Not right now! Switching over to MVC has its obvious advantages, but the time taken to learn it just outweighs those advantages. So webforms it is for the time being.
Now that I decided on webforms, I started getting my hands dirty doing database design. A part of it is proving to be more challenging than I initially thought. Anyway I have decided on the db and now plan to upload some data to validate the design. This is a real pain. The data is available as static text and I need to manually recognize various fields from that text and write (cut and paste) those values in a spreadsheet. This is such a pain. I wish I did not have to do it manually, but cant help it. Of course I am looking at ways to automate the whole process but I think it will take time. Right now I just need to get the data in the database so I can continue building my app.
Of course I will also need to build a utility to upload data to the db from excel. Reminds me of the pdm_upload utility that came with Service Desk. That experience of bulk data uploading is going to come handy now :). So I got my hands full for the time being. That's good! There are a whole lot of other things to take care of as well.
This collating data into excel is proving to be very painful... A lot of donkey work if you ask me...
ReplyDeleteWill develop the excel upload utility later.. putting data into excel is just tooooooooooooo boring.. gonna develop admin screens for data upload from front end first...
ReplyDeleteWhy can't you make a script to read the db and write it out as a simple csv file? I am guessing the db data is ordered correctly.
ReplyDeleteI had to actually do the same not a db but from a really strange cern/fortran 77 formatted output file recently.
Cheers
Rahul
That's the catch Rahul. There is no data in the db. I have to put data in the db. I am getting data from various websites and it is not present in a structured(normalized?) form. Its present as simple sentences. This makes sense to us humans but alas not machines. Recognizing data in these sentences would be a pattern recognition problem I think. e.g Ram and Shyam have a savings bank account and current bank account respectively at the Indiranagar and Koramangala branches of ICICI bank respectively. Here Ram and Shyam (customer table), savings and current (account type table) Indiranagar and Koramangala (branches table) and ICICI bank (banks table). Now the sentence can be framed in any order so right now I am manually entering data. Hope you got what I am trying to say. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
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