Pictures of Real Tcl/Tk Applications
Pictures of Real Tcl/Tk ApplicationsWisql is an interactive GUI for relational databases. There are two versions of Wisql: the original ("wisql-lite"), by Tom Poindexter, and this enhanced, heavyweight Wisql by De Clarke (based on Tom's code).
Wisql Main Window, Data Retrieved
Wisql Main Window, Spreadsheet Results
You can use wisql just like isql or psql or your favourite interactive SQL: type in commands and get results. But you can also easily retrieve your last command (from a ring buffer of 10 commands), Save commands to files and reLoad them later, etc.
Enhanced Wisql was enhanced specifically to make it usable by the SQL-illiterate, and to function as a SQL training tool. So there's fairly verbose and friendly help available under the Help menu.
For the rank beginner, there's a step-by-step guide to using the tool.
Wisql Context Sensitive Popup Help
Wisql's also rife with context-sensitive help -- every active object on the screen will tell you about itself with one mouse click.
Wisql Results Window, Detached
Wisql can be kind of unwieldy on a crowded screen. Also, though you can append results indefinitely, scrolling around in that listbox gets tiring after a while. Users requested detachable results windows, and here is one. You can have as many of them as you like, keeping the results of different queries around for comparison.
For the truly SQL-hopeless, Wisql has a GUI SQL generator. You pick columns to print, construct Boolean expressions to constrain your record selection, then Transfer the generated SQL into the main tool for execution.
Somewhat more useful to the average user (even those not SQL-illiterate) is the generic Table Editor. With EZedit you can edit any table that has a primary key. It's handy when doing spot-corrections of production data, somewhere between the luxury of canned Forms and the annoyance of lengthy SQL typing to fix minor problems.
EZedit has two modes. In Vertical mode, it shows only one record at a time from the set selected in Horizontal mode. It will walk around that set of records (with the Next and Prev buttons) allowing you to view all field values at once.
Wisql EZ-hide, Column Suppressor
Some records are humongously long, and you can't afford enough glass to see all the fields. The EZhide feature lets you make a cheap and dirty "view" -- you can restrict the fields that EZedit will show you, to reduce the size of the editor window down to something manageable.
The Wisql developer never sleeps. The latest beta feature is the ability to select columns of data and plot them against one another, on the fly. This is a sample plot. The release version will have a much nicer control panel, of course. That's the BLT graph widget, by the way... thanks to George Howlett.
de@ucolick.org
