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From: wyle@inf.ethz.ch (Mitchell Wyle)
Newsgroups: comp.databases,comp.text,comp.sw.components,comp.sources.d
Subject: data entry forms, preliminary follow-up
Keywords: forms, table, data entry
Message-ID: <23968@neptune.inf.ethz.ch>
Date: 5 Feb 91 08:18:02 GMT
Sender: news@neptune.inf.ethz.ch
Reply-To: probst@iiic.ethz.ch (Urs Probst)
Organization: ETH, Zurich
Lines: 46

A few hours ago, I wrote:

>I am looking for a PD curses-based forms data entry package with
>field validation, lookup, cursor-movement, editing, etc.
>We have dbm.  We have awk, perl.  Where is a general-purpose entry system?

Hours after my request, I received a couple of good pointers.  Ain't usenet
somethin?



jinx is a system which apparantly does what I want:

Archive-name: jinx/08-Sep-90
Original-posting-by: henkp@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl (Henk P. Penning)
Original-subject: Jinx, an interactive database tool in Perl
Archive-site: sol.cs.ruu.nl [131.211.80.5]
Archive-directory: /pub/UNIX

With Jinx you can perform operations on a database like:
-- update, add, copy and delete records
-- test if all fields in all records match their associated regexp
-- select/delete a subset of the records by various means
-- put back some of the deleted records
-- sort the database on one or more key-fields
-- project on one or more columns
-- join with another database
-- add a column to the database (that is: add a field to every record)
-- insert some records from another database
-- test if some given combination of fields is uniq for all records
-- compute fields as a function of other fields in the record

* * *

I also found a forms package called shellforms by asking archie about
"forms."  Shellforms was posted to comp.sources.unix in volume 14.

Neither package is the table-oriented, data dictionary 4GL approach I was
hoping for, but both are abstract and flexible enough to do anything I
might want to do.  

I know awk and sh.  I have not yet purchased or read the perl book, so I am
leaning towards the shellforms system.  I got the examples running quickly 
and I like the interface.

If I get more replies, I'll follow-up again.