SearchForms v0.6.5

7/17/00 - Initial public release
7/21/00 - Reorganization for version 0.6.5, added phpdoc demo

SearchForms is a modular system for creating HTML forms that can generate an
arbitrary SQL statement. It depends on the SQL Abstraction Layer from the
Enzyme open-source project, as well as the OOHFORMS library from PHPLIB. 
Using the objects provided by SearchForms, you can quickly and easily create
a dynamic user interface for searching a database. 

SearchForms is part of the Enzyme open-source project, and is released under
the terms of the GPL. For more information see:

http://enzyme.sourceforge.net

Both external libraries are in the include/ directory, but this is only a 
temporary condition. The OOHFORMS component is a slightly modified version
of the one that ships with PHPLIB 6.4. The SAL component is a slightly 
modified version of SAL 0.5.2. 

The main-demo/ files are from the Catalyst Recruiting site, for which 
SearchForms was originally deveoped. To view the demo, point a web browser
at the file main-demo/query2.php3. This file will show a search form, 
which, when submitted, will generate fairly complex SQL statements. Each o
f the UI widgets in this demo represent a standard class in SearchForms. 

Each of the menus at the top of the form are called "filters" - each choice
names a single complete SQL statement which limits the search result set.

The menus in the "Show me" row are three in kind. One is a filter which 
selects a SQL statement. Each statement is linked to a text-based input
box, and another menu which chooses an operation (=, >, <, like). Further,
below each filter is a "suggest" box which contains a list of values
which are valid input for the currently-selected item. This data is extracted
from the database via a cron job that runs the file special_menu.php3 and
generates the Javascript file special_menu.js (in session/).

The last row shows a SearchForms "sort" object, which picks a SQL statement
to order the data set. 

The rest of the widgets are standard OOHFORMS types. 

The SQL queries that are linked to these various widgets are built using the
SAL in setup_queries.inc and filter_queries.inc. The code to generate the
search form itself is in special_query.inc which takes its HTML layout from
form_layout.ihtml and search_row.ihtml. 

sqlforms.inc contains the SearchForms-specific extensions to the OOHFORMS
library, which is contained in include/ For more information on this library,
see the PHPLIB documentation at http://phplib.netuse.de

The images in the images/ directories are owned by Catalyst Recruiting and
may not be used without permission. They are included here strictly for the
purposes of the demo.

special_query.inc is derived from the PHPLIB class Sql_Query and attempts
to adopt a similar syntax. 

Some functionality for the demo requires being connected to a real live 
database with PHPLIB's session management installed. These features include
the ability to move "next" and "prev" through a result set, and the ability
to dynamically increase and decrease the number of search rows in the
search form. To enable these features, simply uncomment the relevant code
in query2.php3 and connect this to a proper database. You may get a useful
schema from the Enzyme or EnzymeTemplates package from the Enzyme home page.
Or, you may edit the relevant queries in setup_queries.inc and/or 
filter_queries.inc to match your own schema.