Editing Html table.

Hi, I want to allow an admin user that has no html knowledge to be able to edit this table , anyone know how to do it? I want the admin to be able to add or remove or edit any box in the table.

Forgot to add prefix to this post, apologies.

Many thanks.

CreepingDeath

Then you're looking for dynamic content.

Store the data in a database.
Create other screens to allow the admin user to add/update/remove items from the database.

Alternatively, if you're looking for something simpler I suppose you could read the data from a text file. But wouldn't have as much control over it.
It wouldn't be as fool proof.

Yeah I was thinking the database thing too, but I need an example of some code of how to have each box in the table reference a particular piece of text from the database and also allow it to be editable. I know it might be a big ask, but can anyone help?

NeverSayDie

sacramento wrote: »

Yeah I was thinking the database thing too, but I need an example of some code of how to have each box in the table reference a particular piece of text from the database and also allow it to be editable. I know it might be a big ask, but can anyone help?

There's quite a lot to that, and more to the point, there's a thousand different ways of doing it, so you're not really going to get an answer on a plate - it's just not that cut and dried.

Broadly speaking, you'll have some code on the webserver that will generate the HTML output (and process the users' input) on the fly, interacting with a database (or other datastore) along the way.

Again, there's a wide variety of different technologies, languages and techniques that are used to do that. Two popular ones for getting this kind of thing going in a hurry would be Ruby (with something called Rails) or ASP.NET. Googling either of those should get you started. PHP is another popular one, and it probably has third-party stuff available to set up these kind of interactive table displays of data (sometimes called "grids") easily (doing this kind of thing from scratch can be unnecessarily messy and time-consuming). ASP.NET and Ruby on Rails (I think) have built-in support for that kind of thing.

For a database, either MySQL or SQL Server would be your best bet, any of the technologies I mentioned will work with either of those, though you'll find more resources for using ASP.NET with SQL Server and PHP/Ruby with MySQL - those would be typical combinations. All the required tools and software for any of those technologies are free to download. You'll need to run ASP.NET and SQL Server on Windows for practical use, if you're running a Mac/Linux PC, look towards PHP or Ruby (they'll also work fine on Windows).

DonkeyStyle \o/

Would it be out of the question to set up this admin person with a free WYSIWYG html editor and ftp client?
And possibly set them up with an account that's limited to that ftp directory?
If they can learn to navigate a CMS, or email a word document surely this isn't a lot to ask of them.

roc_racer

This might not suit you - but you could use JBoss Seam and the seam-gen wizard to give you an out of the box WAR deployment with little or no coding. It uses RichFaces for the presentation layer so looks really slick from the off.