WebDB

What is WebDB?

WebDB is a database web interface aimed at non-technical users, providing simple means to navigate and edit a database. It is akin to phpMyAdmin, in that it presents the data and structure of databases to the user for viewing and modification, but where phpMyAdmin is a database administrator's tool, WebDB tries to make things pretty and easy for users who are primarily interested in the data (and not the schema). For example: field names are properly capitalised and formatted; foreign keys are presented as links to their referenced records; and edit form fields are all matched to their underlying data types to make it as easy as possible to enter data. Many other features make WebDB a (hopefully) useful prototyping or bare-bones database interface.

• Download: https://github.com/samwilson/kohana_webdb/archive/master.zip
• Latest Version: 5.0.0 (2014-08-13)
• Licence: Simplified BSD License
• Homepage: http://github.com/samwilson/kohana_webdb
• Established: March 2008
• Author: Sam Wilson

Quick Start

1. Download and uncompress in a web-accessible location.

2. Run composer install.

3. Copy config.dist.php to config.php and edit the constants therein.

4. Copy any required module configuration files from modules/*/config into application/config and change whatever's required. At a minimum this will be just auth.php.

5. Set up database information and an authentication source:

   • Set Auth driver to 'DB' in application/config/auth.php;
   • OR set all credentials in application/config/database.php and elect to use a different Auth driver (such as ORM, LDAP, or file) in application/config/auth.php.

   If you do the latter, you will also need to set up whatever else is required for your chosen Auth driver.

6. That's it! You can now log in.

Schema Structure and Nomenclature

For their records be edited or viewed, tables need to have single-column primary keys, with values that can be included in URLs. For example, autoincrementing integers.

Access Control

WebDB has a number of different options for user authentication and authorisation. Credentials can be supplied from the Database configuration file, user input, or elsewhere (such as an LDAP server) — and are generally a combination of these. How they are combined, and the options for further refining users' permissions, are detailed below.

• If valid connection details are provided in application/config/database.php then these will be used to connect to the database. The user will at this point have all of the permissions of the database user. Note that if the MySQL anonymous user (who has an empty username) is present, then its access will apply at this point.
• User authentication is handled by the Auth module, and so any drivers for that module can be used. The DB driver (provided with WebDB) can be used to authenticate as MySQL users.
• If a valid MySQL user is given in the Database configuration file, and a driver other than DB is selected in the Auth configuration file, then users can authenticate against that other driver, and if logged in will have all of the permissions of the MySQL user.

Other Features

• Table and column comments are displayed wherever appropriate. For MySQL, column comments are limited to 255 characters, and table comments to only 60 characters.
• Foreign keys are shown as links to their foreign rows, or (when being edited) as drop-down lists (either normal HTML ones, for short lists, or AJAX auto-complete ones, for longer lists).
• Users can filter by any column and a range of operations ('contains', 'is empty', 'equals', etc.). This includes searching foreign keys for values found in the 'title column' of the foreign table.
• The first non-primary unique key is used as a table's 'title column', and displayed wherever a table is referred to from another table (i.e. from a foreign key).
• An import feature allows data in CSV format to be brought into a database, undergoing required sanity-checking and transformation (for e.g. foreign keys) on the way.

Modules

Modules for WebDB are just normal Kohana modules. There is also nacent support for plugging in to the main WebDB codebase, so modules can interact with it in more complex ways.

Modules can be installed with Composer (search for 'kohana' on Packagist).

There are currently two WebDB-specific modules:

• DBAuth module integration
• Entity Relationship Diagrams

Simplified BSD License

Copyright © 2014, Sam Wilson. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

• Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
• Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

This software is provided by the copyright holders and contributors "as is" and any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall the copyright holder or contributors be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data, or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this software, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.