Subversion-Projekte lars-tiefland.prado

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<h1>Creating Database</h1>

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Most Web applications use database to keep data. Our blog system is not an exception. In this section, we will describe how to write database-driven pages for our blog system. We will use techniques including <a href="http://www.pradosoft.com/demos/quickstart/?page=Database.DAO">database access object (DAO)</a> and <a href="http://www.pradosoft.com/demos/quickstart/?page=Database.ActiveRecord">Active Record</a>.

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For tutorial purpose, we have simplified the requirements of our blog system so that it only needs to deal with user and post data. We thus create two database tables, <tt>users</tt> and <tt>posts</tt>, as shown in the following entity-relationship (ER) diagram.

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<img src="<%~ ER.gif %>" class="output" />

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We use a SQLite 3 database to keep our data. We first convert the ER diagram into the following SQL statements and save them in the file <tt>protected/schema.sql</tt>.

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/* create users table */

CREATE TABLE users (

  username      VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,

  email         VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL,

  password      VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL,  /* in plain text */

  role          INTEGER NOT NULL,       /* 0: normal user, 1: administrator */

  first_name    VARCHAR(128),

  last_name     VARCHAR(128)

);

/* create posts table */

CREATE TABLE posts (

  post_id       INTEGER NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,

  author_id     VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL

                CONSTRAINT fk_author REFERENCES users(username),

  create_time   INTEGER NOT NULL,       /* UNIX timestamp */

  title         VARCHAR(256) NOT NULL,  /* title of the post */

  content       TEXT,                   /* post body */

  status        INTEGER NOT NULL        /* 0: published; 1: draft; 2: pending; 2: denied */

);

/* insert some initial data records for testing */

INSERT INTO users VALUES ('admin', 'admin@example.com', 'demo', 1, 'Qiang', 'Xue');

INSERT INTO users VALUES ('demo', 'demo@example.com', 'demo', 0, 'Wei', 'Zhuo');

INSERT INTO posts VALUES (NULL, 'admin', 1175708482, 'first post', 'this is my first post', 0);

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The <tt>fk_author</tt> constraint is ignored by SQLite because SQLite does not support <a href="http://www.sqlite.org/omitted.html">foreign key constraint</a>. Nevertheless, we still keep the constraint there for the capability of porting our blog system to different DBMS. Also, in the above we are exploiting the fact that the <tt>posts.post_id</tt> field is <a href="http://www.sqlite.org/autoinc.html">auto-incremental</a> if we assign NULL to it.

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We then use the <a href="http://www.sqlite.org/download.html">SQLite command line tool</a> to create the SQLite database. We create a directory <tt>protected/data</tt> to hold the SQLite database file. We now execute the following command under the directory <tt>protected/data</tt>:

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sqlite3 blog.db < ../schema.sql

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The database has been created as <tt>protected/data/blog.db</tt> and we shall see the following directories and files:

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<img src="<%~ directories.gif %>" class="output" />

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It is required by SQLite that both the directory <tt>protected/data</tt> and the database file <tt>protected/data/blog.db</tt> be set writable by the Web server process.

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