Alan’s Blogometer

Morphing Grid by Dan Allison.

Ever find yourself with a data collection, and you can see the steps in your head, create a form, create a table? It’s a dry task that gets dryer by the minute once you find yourself once again creating that paged results table for the contact us or event registration form you’ve created a thousand times before.

I can’t tell you how much slicker it is to send that data directly to an EditGrid workbook. It is a quick and easy database that is intuitive for your users. Instead of a paged html table, their information is available as rich full-featured spreadsheet.

New Orleans Permits

Recently, I set out to create a database of every building permit issued in the City of New Orleans since January of 2005. This is to support the work of Karen Gadbois, Matt McBride and Sarah Elise Lewis. Ultimately, I created a resource that does not exist anywhere else in the world. A collection of building permits with contact information, the type of structure and permit, the geocoded address of the permit, and the date the permit was issued. The who, what, where and when of the recovery of the City of New Orleans.

The process is as follows; I’d fetch a permit from the city website. Parse the HTML permit page and covert it a structured XML document of permit data. I’d then geocode the address to get the latitude and longitude and a normalized address. Then I’d put the permit into an EditGrid workbook.

I implemented the program as a Java command line application. It now runs from my server five times a day so that the spreadsheet is always up to date.

EditGrid API

Getting started with EditGrid API was quick. The documentation is straghtforward. The methods in the API map directly to the functionality you’ll find in the menus.

I had a false start when I tired to use Apache CXF instead of Apache Axis. The size and volume of the data collected triggers some limits, but the limits of EditGrid were easily accommodated.

I wrote about the EditGrid API in A Programmer’s Notebook on the EditGrid API. Read it if you’re interested in details. Read on if you’re interested in an overview.

Sizzle and Steak

The spreadsheet itself made quite a splash when I showed it around. It took some explaining, because it turns out that not many people in know me as a computer programmer. I was asked how long it took me to enter all this data often enough, that I learned to launch into the program description.

I was able to share the database by sending out a link to the EditGrid spreadsheet. For real pizzaz, I’d IM the link to someone while the program was updating an ask them to scroll down to see the rows snapping into place with a red to white AJAX flash.

This little flourish is one of many. For zero programmer hours, I’ve got a full-featured UI that is far more fabulous than anything I could do with and HTML table.

Spreadsheets As You Like It

The data goes straight into EditGrid. It’s public. People are able to immediately export the EditGrid to Excel and work with it on their desktops.

For New Orleans, which is still very much a desktop and email user base, publishing in EditGrid means that people always have the latest data in Excel using the export menu. But, I won’t feel lonley and left behind, because they’ll always come back to visit my EditGrid spreadsheet to get the latest in Excel.

Simple Password Protection

For the people I work with, “First, go and create a new account at…” elicits sighs and glazed looks.

Thus, one of the great features of EditGrid is the many different sharing options. Not only can I pick and choose other EditGrid users who can view a spreadsheet, I can assign a password to a spreadsheet to protect it.

This means I can create a spreadsheet and share it with a link and a password, rather than having to ask people to join a new Web 2.0 website in order to share the data.

The protection is every flavor, protected read-only, protected read and write, read and protected write. If I’d only wanted to share the permits database with a select few during testing, those select few do not have jump through registration hoops to see the data.

If they did, I know that the response would be, can you just email it to me? Please? And then I’m no longer a computer programmer, I’m a data secretary.

Funny, but up until yesterday, I’d fogotten all about embedding. I knew that EditGrid was embedalbe, I’d embedded it before, but it’d forgot.

A Humble EditGrid

Finally, EditGrid is embedable. This means that I can put the data I’ve published in EditGrid in Think New Orleans. The EditGrid will have the export menu, so the core functionality that I need for my application will be available under a thinknola.com URL. I’ll be able to track who’s visiting the spreadsheets. When people visit they can see the Think New Orleans identity and know that this is a project of Think New Orleans.

The EditGrid logo and a link to EditGrid is present and yet it is so unassuming.

It’s almost too kind.

It’s almost as if I’d written a lovely full-featured spreadsheet for my website myself, but I didn’t.

EditGrid Prototype and Productoin

I now have a working application that I can completely forget. It is a working application that is of great benefit to the nonprofit and neighborhood organizations of the New Orleans recovery.

Yes, I’ll create a relational database, so I can begin to collect other data sources and relate them. I’m a programmer like you. I want something bigger and better and more complex.

Starting with EditGrid, I’ve captured the data, published the data, and it is now a structured data source for that fancy relational database I’ll create, and for anyone in New Orleans with ArcGIS, Google Earth, SPSS, SAS or Excel.

The EditGrid spreadsheets will be the data source for the permits tables of my relational database. It will keep me honest in the maintenance of this resource. Own dogfood eaten here.

Use EditGrid for Your Next Database

EditGrid is a full featured spreadsheet in it’s own right. I use it for budgets and time sheets.

Yet, it’s these features that make it a great tool for creating ad hoc databases.

• The EditGrid SOAP API.
• Public spreadsheets with simple password protection.
• The export menu.
• An unobtrusive embed.

If you need to throw together a database, like a registration form, use EditGrid as your database, and password protect the workbook.

You’ll save a lot of time on HTML tables, and you can focus on converting the visitors to your website into registrants.

If you want to publish some summary data for the public, publish to EdiGrid, so they can see the data, copy it to their own EditGrid workbook, or download it to their desktop spreadsheet.

You’ll be able to forget all your automated service as I have, and provide people with the latest data wrapped in a slick UI with an ever growing feature set, while you’re working on the next thing.