DaDaBIK 11 Elba is here: live edit, import/synch from MS Excel and more

Posted by Eugenio on 17 Jun 2021

Dear DaDaBIK users,
I am very glad to announce the release of DaDaBIK 11 "Elba".

Some long-awaited features are finally available, I will briefly introduce the main news here, please have a look at our release video to see the new features in action.

To promote the adoption of this new version, for just 7 days (until June 24th):
• DaDaBIK Enterprise IS ON SALE AT €125 instead of €190 (in USD: $149 instead of $229)
• DaDaBIK Platinum IS ON SALE AT €415 instead of €595 (in USD: $495 instead of $695)

You can buy DaDaBIK 11 from here https://dadabik.com/download

Here are the news!

Live editing
For some of the fields you can now edit values directly on the results grid, by double clicking on the cell, without entering the record in edit mode.

Import from MS Excel (Enterprise/Platinum only)
Users can now import data into a table from MS Excel (OpenOffice and CSV are also supported).
This new feature is very flexible; the very basic usage is: import the raw data from a file having, in the header, the same column names you have in your DB table. But you can do much more: in your custom_functions.php file you can easily specify:
• The correspondence between column names and DB field names
• The transformation rules (you might need to change the data before importing it)
• The preview rules
• and more...

Synchronization with MS Excel (Platinum only)
Not only you can decide to import all the rows into your table, you can also decide to synch your table with your Excel file (OpenOffice / CSV). What does it mean? DaDaBIK checks, for each row, if it's already available in your table and in case it is, it will update the existing DB record instead of inserting a new one. You can specify the field (or combination of fields) DaDaBIK must use to "recognize" existing records.

AJAX file upload
Uploads are now executed asynchronously, before submitting the form, showing a progress bar during the upload process; this makes them much more user friendly, especially for big files.

Add a record to a lookup table via pop-up window
Near to your lookup field you have now a + button that opens a pop-up window; from the window, the user can add a new item to the related linked table and the item will immediately be available for the current form after having closed the pop-up.

Other new features include a new maintenance mode (you can enable it from the admin section without using config parameters) and the new search by URL feature, which allows to embed a search filter into a URL.

You can find all the new features and bug fixes in the change log and, as mentioned before, you can find an analysis of the new features in the second half of our release video on youtube.

As usual, if you already have a license, get your v. 10 copy from the upgrade page. If you have an Enterprise license and want to upgrade to Platinum, reply to this email.

How about the name, "Elba"?
Elba is a lovely Italian island near the coast of Tuscany. After three releases named after villages in Liguria (Lerici, Monterosso, Manarola), this 2021 version explores a new region :)

Have a wonderful summer!

Best,


--
Eugenio Tacchini
DaDaBIK Founder

DaDaBIK 10.6 is here.

Posted by Eugenio on 26 Jan 2021

Dear all,
DaDaBIK 10.6 is here.

This is a maintenance release containing two important fixes related to sqlserver and Wordpress and some other general fixes.

Check the change log to see the complete list of fixes and changes:
https://dadabik.com/index.php?function=show_changelog

If you are using DaDaBIK with sqlserver or as a Wordpress plugin, it's particularly important for you to upgrade.


You can buy your license here https://dadabik.com/download.

As usual, if you already have a license, get your v. 10.6 copy from the upgrade page: https://dadabik.com/index.php?function=show_upgrade_new

Best,


Eugenio Tacchini
DaDaBIK founder

DaDaBIK 10.5 is here.

Posted by Eugenio on 14 Jan 2021

Dear all,
DaDaBIK 10.5 is here.

This release contains some bug fixes and a few new features.

Bugs fixed: the most important one is probably an issue with "copy permission" that in some particular case didn't work as expected. For all the details, check the change log: if you are in the situation described in the changelog, your permissions might be not correctly set.

The most important new feature: you can now use "conditional" fields logic even in the results grid. Let's say you have a products table with many fields and you wan to show, in the results grid, only a subset of those fields, according to which "product type" the user selects as a search filter. You can now do it. Check the documentation for all the details.

Thanks for all your feedback related to the new upgrade procedure, very much appreciated. Upgrading DaDaBIK is now easier than it used to be and hopefully it will improve even more in the future; I've improved the procedure a bit already, considering some of the suggestions I've received from you.

I suggest to check all the change log anyway to see fixes, new features and changes:
https://dadabik.com/index.php?function=show_changelog

You can buy your license here https://dadabik.com/download.

As usual, if you already have a license, get your v. 10.5 copy from the upgrade page: https://dadabik.com/index.php?function=show_upgrade_new

Best,


Eugenio Tacchini
DaDaBIK founder

DaDaBIK 10.4 is here: faster, more secure and with a new easy upgrade procedure

Posted by Eugenio on 10 Dec 2020

Hello everybody,

I am glad to announce the availability of DaDaBIK 10.4 Manarola.

The aim of this release is to provide a faster, more secure and easier to upgrade DaDaBIK.

New upgrade procedure

Upgrading DaDaBIK is way easier now. If you have any DaDaBIK starting from V.5, you just have to copy two files (up.php and up2.php) in your DaDaBIK folder and run up.php. DaDaBIK will ask you to put the ZIP package you downloaded into a specific folder and then it will start copying/deleting the right files by itself and applying the correct updates to your DB. If you edited config.php, DaDaBIK will tell you which config.php parameters you might have modified, so you can add them to the config_custom.php file (which, starting from this version, is the only config file you should edit).

Performances

The code that takes care of the granular permissions has been optimized in various sections. This has an impact on the performances (time to load a page in DaDaBIK) if you are running a database having a very huge number of tables/fields. You should notice the difference if you are still running PHP 5: in this situation, for certain pages, you could get even a 5x speed improvement. My suggestion, however, is to move to PHP 7, to get better security and performances.

Security

A new input check, called "Dropdown security form check" has been added to prevent the registration of wrong data, check the change log for details.

Many libraries used by DaDaBIK have been updated to the latest stable version, this fixes bugs and security issues that versions previously used by DaDaBIK had.

Other bugs have been fixed, in particular you should check carefully the change log if in your environment you have session.auto_start = 1 in php.ini or if you are using select_multiple_* fields.

The documentation has been improved and a general chapter related to custom code (best practices and rules) has been added.

I suggest to check anyway all the change log

You can buy your license here https://dadabik.com/download.

As usual, if you already have a license, get your v. 10.4 copy from the upgrade page.



Best,

Eugenio Tacchini
DaDaBIK founder

Best practices for DaDaBIK applications development, part 2/2

Posted by Eugenio on 17 Nov 2020

Hello everybody,
in the first part of this blog post (if you missed it, https://blog.dadabik.com/post/112 ) I discussed how important is a correct database design when you want to build a complex DaDaBIK application.

In this second part, I'll discuss other aspects you should consider during DaDaBIK apps development. I am a software developer with tens of years of experience but when I have to develop a typical enterprise application (business processes automation, dashboards/analytics, ..), I don't code it from scratch, I use DaDaBIK: typically I can finish the work in a fraction of time, avoiding repetitive tasks and focusing on the code that matters. That's why I think I can give some general advice to developers who are not expert low-coders yet.

Here are my suggestions. 

1. Avoid, unless it's really, really the only way, to modify the DaDaBIK core code to customize the layout of your applications. There are some PHP core files that you can, if you want, modify (for example /views/results_grid.php or /views/form.php). If you are a coder, it's tempting because a little modification on form.php can render the form exactly as you like. However, when a new version of DaDaBIK comes out and you want to upgrade, your modifications will be overwritten and you have to re-apply them, maybe to a slightly different code.
   
   You can avoid that: not only the form configurator is now a quite complex tool that allows you to customize your forms in great details, but there are at least three other ways to impact on the DaDaBIK layout without editing the DaDaBIK core code:
   
   
   
   • CSS: you can edit the styles_screen_custom.css file, a file dedicated to CSS customizations
     
     
   • Layout hooks: you can write your own code (PHP, HTML, Javascript) that will be executed when a particular part of the layout is rendered; for example, the customers before edit form header hook - long name, I know :) - is executed before displaying the header of the customers edit form
     
     
   • Datagrid templates: DaDaBIK, by default, creates standard reports: results grids representing the records you have in your table/view (or the results of a search). In case you want to represent your records using a different layout, you can optionally write your own HTML template.
     
     
   Custom CSS, layout hooks and datagrid templates are NOT overwritten during a DaDaBIK upgrade.
   
   Finally, if in your application you need a page that is very different from the classic DaDaBIK pages (forms, tabular grids, charts, …) , you should think about creating a custom page that, again, is not overwritten during a DaDaBIK upgrade.
   
   


2. VIEWS are very powerful, you should really learn how to use them. Views can be used in DaDaBIK to create pre-defined reports or filtered versions of a table (e.g. I can create a view italian_customers that shows only the customers whose country is "Italy" and add it to my main menu, just after the "standard" "Customers" menu item), but this is just the basic use. More in general, it often happens that you can overcome a DaDaBIK limitation using a VIEW, creating a "virtual" data structure that represents the information in the way that DaDaBIK expects.
   
   Let me give you an example: let's say you have three tables:
   • products (id_product, name_prodcuts id_brand, price_product)
   • brands (id_brand, name_brand, id_country)
   • countries (id_country, name_country)
   
   When you display your products, you might want to see the name of the corresponding brand: easy, you should just declare id_brand in products as a lookup field and "link" the table brands. But IF you want to see the country of the brand as well, you are stuck, the country's name is in the table countries and DaDaBIK doesn't find it.
   
   The easy solution is the following: you create a brands2 view that joins brands and countries and use it as a source of your lookup field instead of brands. You kept your database normalized and, at the same time, you gave DaDaBIK what it wants.
   
   DaDaBIK treats a VIEW exactly as it treats a table and don't forget that, despite what most of the people think, if your VIEW is updatable (see what it means for MySQL, for example: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/view-updatability.html) you can also INSERT records in a VIEW (the records will be inserted in the underlying base table).
   

   If you learn some basic SQL and how to create VIEWS, this can really make the difference if you need to create a complex applications and you can probably learn the basics in a couple of hours just by following my tutorials:
   
   
   
   
   

   
   


3. Spend an appropriate amount of time thinking about your validation functions. As you know, with DaDaBIK, you can rely on built-in validation functions (e.g. if you declare a field as email, DaDaBIK checks if the value inserted is a valid email) but you can also add your own validation function, written in PHP. Weather you rely just on built-in validation or you use your custom validation function, the validation of your users' input is very important.
   
   You might think that you have trusted, tech-savvy final users who won't add garbage to your database but in my experience this is ALWAYS a wrong assumption, at some point someone, by mistake or on purpose, will add some content that is not allowed and this can have an impact on your whole application.
   
   


4. Permissions: if you care about your data (and you should), when you grant permissions to your DaDaBIK users you must follow the Principle of least privilege (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege) and give to each group only the permissions the users need to work.
   
   With DaDaBIK it's easy to copy permissions from one group to another so, for example: if only Bob and Alice of the group Red need some additional privileges, don't add the privileges to the whole group, create another group Green, copy the privileges from Red to Green, add the additional privileges and move Bob and Alice to Green.
   
   


5. Audit/Revisions & logs are extremely useful, and they can help you manage critical situations. Even if you think to have planned everything well, in my experience at some point you might end up in situations where you don't understand why your data don't look as expected:
   
   
   
   “how can this order be in APPROVED status if the corresponding product is not available? ”
   
   
   If you have enabled Audit/revisions and logs, you can check the history of a particular record, see when the status has changed and who (or what) made the change. DaDaBIK, by default, tracks in the logs table only the Insert, Update, Delete operations executed using the standard, built-in, interface.
   
   You can, however, log also your own custom operations! Let's say, for example, that you created a custom button "APPROVE" for the orders table, when a user clicks on it, the status of the order is changed and some other operations are executed. Inside your custom function, you can manually call the log_operation function using a specific label, e.g.
   
   
   
   log_operation('approve_order', '');
   
   
   this function call will create an entry in your logs table containing information about who and when approved the order, that, together with the Audit/Revision entries, can help you understanding what happened.
   
   


6. Row-level custom filters is another very powerful feature, in particular when you have to deal with Multi-tenant applications: let's say you want to use the same DaDaBIK application to serve several different organizations and you need each organization to see only its own data: you can add a field to your users table that defines the organization each user belongs to (e.g. id_organization), use this field also in all the tables you want to "partition" and then add a row-level custom filter that show, to each user, only the records belonging to their organization.

That's it, I hope this second part has been useful to you!

Best,

Eugenio Tacchini
DaDaBIK founder