Before sitting down and writing a lot of code myself I figured I ask here if a certain something already exists. What I am looking for is something to design completely data driven, database stored web pages easily. I need to make webpages that reconfigure on the fly. The system calls thyuat the enduser who will not be a proggrammer can decide on who sees what.
So for example lets take a page that displays customer information. And for the example lets keep it simple we have the name, address, phone#, open balance etc. The page should be designed that an admin has an admin page - or some other easy way where he can decide on the fly that UserA for example sees everything, UserB cannot see the balance and UserD can only see the name and phone #. Now multiply this by close to a 100 different tables with dozends of fields each.
Granted one could put the authentication into the script - but this will be cumbersome writing as before every object, field displayed there would have to be something like
if (checkright(<parameter list>) {<code to display object}
My approach would be to create a class/object for each type of control (input field, button, popup etc) and store it in a table for the form. Something like
Pageid ObjId ClassName Parent Properties Style Code etc
Now all you'd need is a table where the users rights are stored like
userId Pageid Objid ShowObject ReadWrite etc
So now at the Mysql end you could write a query that returns the page objects for that particular user (all where ShowObject is true) and the PHP loader program could then generate the HTML/Java code to send to the browser to allow field validation, Display of data from one of the above mentioned tables and allow to Edit or Add depending on the permissions set in the userrights file.
That way only data pertinent to that particular user is sent to the browser and Data not needed won't even be retrieved from the mysql server. Its envisioned to also create the SQL statementes "On the fly" and only select the fields necessary for that particular user.
I got into PHP a few years ago and found it easy (mainly because it reminds me of my C (without any + or #) days. Also done a bit of AJAX work with it. So I feel it is possible.
So my main question - does it already exist?
And if not would there be any interest for a library like that. Because if I spend the time writing it (which obviously would go beyond that particular job) then it would be nice to reap some rewards.
TIA for your comments
