what language do i use to write a webpage in to automatically update from a database of sorts?

Question

Hey Guys and Gals,

I have what I consider a bit of a tricky question. I am currently working on quite a large spread sheet (266 rows aith 70 coloumns and its only going to get bigger) that is a database of sorts and I want to remove it from Excel and put it on to an intranet page. I am currently writing it in a combination of HTML and Javascript for functionality, but it is becoming very hard to ensure that the data is in the right place. I am wondering if there is a possible way of being able to save the Excel spreadsheet into a certain format (like CSV or XML) and then write a program (for on a HTML page) that would display all of the infomation in a table automatically? is this even possible?

Unfortunatly i do not have access to a server to be able help with this, it all needs to be able to be coded in the page itself.

Thankyou for all your input Guys and Gals

Answer 1

Based on your comment, a normalized database for this type of thing would look like this:

table `workers`
- id
- name
- ...

table `trainings`
- id
- title
- description
- ...

table `workers_in_training`
- worker_id
- training_id

This allows you to create a logical matrix as well without the need to change the schema (keep adding columns) for each new training/worker. Of course, this realistically requires a database server of some sort and knowledge in a server side programming language (PHP, Python, Ruby, C#, anything). If you don't have that, an Access database/app may be an acceptable compromise. Doing it all in Javascript is certainly interesting, but is an idea you should abandon as early as possible.

Answer 2

Given your constraints, I would save the Excel spreadsheet as a CSV and put it in the same location as your HTML file, then use AJAX to fetch the contents of the CSV and dynamically generate a HTML table based on the contents.

Look here for how to fetch a URL's contents using AJAX (jQuery library): http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.get/

After fetching the URL content, you will have the CSV as a big string in a JavaScript variable. I'll let you have the fun of figuring out how to parse it :-)

Once you know how to parse your CSV string to recognise rows and columns, look here for how to generate HTML table dynamically using jQuery library: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/103489/building-an-html-table-on-the-fly-using-jquery