display several tables in pagination

Question

I am using cake php and mysql.

I have several tables that all link up to a table called relates. The relates table holds the primary ids for all the other tables. example I have a table called clients its primary key is called id in the relates table its called client_id.

heres my deal i created a crud application in cakephp it works great, but it only displays information via pagination for one table. I would like to use pagination to display several tables at once so i can display my clients table and another tables like clientsphone table ect. I tried a few things out but i am completely lost. In my relates table i created pagination for it and it shows the primary ids when you click the primary id is goes to the proper record and displays the information from that table, but display just numbers wont help anyone if you dont know what it is.

how can i display several tables at once for the relates table ? any advice would be great

Answer 1

This really depends on what you're looking for.

If you'd like to have all the data at hand but not necessarily on screen at once, a great solution would be to use jQuery's UI Tabs. You could throw each table in a separate div and easily toggle them with the tabs.

You could display multiple at once a la a stock trading application. But from a UI standpoint that can get ugly in a hurry.

How about dynamically building one gigantic table via HTML or JSON string then using jQuery's datatables to paginate, sort, filter, and show/hide columns? That probably would give you the best of all worlds while still making it readable to your users. You could also use Datatables and tabs together to get more than one at a time. Datatables is the easiest way I can think of to make a standard table more user friendly quickly.