I'm am new to web development and perl so please pardon some of my questions.

With the help of JP Deni I have gotten dbman to work on a Windows 98 platform. However, the demo presentation is not useful for my purpose, and my need is truly simple. I need to allow users to query a flat file db that contain name, phone number, and organization code. No one needs to add, delete, or modiy the data file, it will be replaced on a periodic basis. I need the output returned in table format, all on one page with a limit of 10 records per page - this number needs to be able to be modified. However, the user should be to get all records returned by pressing a next button, or some mechanism. The user also needs to be able to send just the result set to a printer or a file. In the perl gci forum someone mentioned looking at something called Link and search.cgi. Do you know where I can find this code?

I have seen this done on other web sites and I have a limited time to get a like site working. I am learning all of this but it takes time.

You could do all you want with DBMan. The first thing you would want to do is to configure your copy of DBMan to fit the requirements of your database. The best advice I can give you is to go to the tutorial on my site

http://www.jpdeni.com/dbman/tutorial.html

and follow the instructions.

Sending search results to a printable format or .txt file would not be a problem at all.

Understand that configuring and working with DBMan is not something you will finish in a day or two.

The Links script you referred to is available here on this site. It might work for you, too, but it would also take a lot of configuring to adapt it to your needs.


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JPD

JPD,

Sometimes words just don't register. I saw the LINKS 2.0 script on this site's homepage when I downloaded DBMan and it did not register that this was the program being talked about.

I guess your tutorial page is a good place to start for figuring out dbman. I printed it out your site but I don't have the text with me.

In the mean time I have a script, that I got from ...

(http://www.panix.com/~wizjd/cgi-bin/phone.txt)

... that's almost what I want and I have it working as well. I know my people won't be satisfied with simple things and eventually the functionality of dbman will be needed.
So I'll keep-on-keepin-on with learning it. I don't give up I will get this to work the way I want, and I will understand it.

In the mean time the questions will keep coming your way.

Thanks, again.

Excellent! That's what I like to see. You are interested in learning about how the whole thing works and how to make it work even better for you.

It's also an advantage that you have a script that is working in the interim. It will give you time to work on DBMan on the side without the pressure of having to get it together right now.

As questions come up, ask away.

Possibly I should make the tutorial available in a .txt file to make it easier for people to print out. The biggest problem is that some of the lines are quite long and they will either cut off the ends or wrap around, either one of which is not good. But maybe if it was in a file that people could switch back and forth in, it would be better. I'll think about doing that.


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JPD