Dictionary Driven Development

Introduction

It is often critical to have a web interface that allow you to Created, Retreative Update and Delete (CRUD) records on a table. The standard CRUD application has a List Page showing the records of the table and links on each record in the table so that you can update or delete them. The list page also contains a button to allow you to add a new record. There are either two or three screens in a CRUD application, a list screen and one Edit/Add page or two pages one Edit and one Add.

In development a "standard" is developed and implemented for the first series of CRUD pages. After that most of the code that was written can be copied and used replacing the Table Name and all of the field names.

If you build a data dictionary where you provide "meta" data for the data table with information such as:

• For each table
• Table Name
• Table Display Name
• Connection String
• End User Description
• Is it required
• For Each Field in the table
• Field Name
• Field Display Name
• Data Type
• Is it a list field?
• Does it have a dropdown box for input
• Is it required

This website is web development workbench where you can create a Data Dictionary and use that information to help develop CRUD applications. There are seveal ways that this can be accomplished:

• Use a single set of code that uses the data dictionary to automatically build the CRUD application at run time. This approach allows you to add or delete fields on the fly without having to change any code. It has the disadvantage that it is difficult when tables or fields require special treatment.
• Use the tool to build source file code for each table. This has the advantage that you can easily modify the source code for a field or table. It has the downside that you have to go through and make modifications in a lot of places if a field is added or deleted.

This site was created by Stanley Merrill who is an application development consultant.