From time to time, when I find a good workflow or dataflow, I like to share with the community in case someone is looking for a good solution for what has worked well for those who might be in a similar predicament.
For many years, I have always rolled my own database interface class. though it has served me well in the past, I realized that there was a lot of work associated when proceeding in such fashion. I decided recently to give bob’s Argens tool a try and after working with the demo application, I realized right away that this is a tool that I need add as part of my development tool stack. I was able to take a project I started working on the database design which nearly 40 tables to work with and Argens was able to take all of the tables an columns and transformed them into an OOP oriented way to interact with the datasets as well as offer additional features of adding in audit tables as well as keeping tracking of primary / foreign key relationships with such little effort on my part. In addition, it defaults to prepared statement database interaction which is something that all of us should use as best practice.
In addition, I wanted to share a note about Navicat. The database design diagram tool they offer is worth its weight in gold. Navicat makes designing very simple and complex database stress-free while giving the user full control over how relationships are held between tables.
anywho… I just wanted to share my experience with these two products. If you are considering rolling your own database interface class, please try Argens first before committing to spending hours on something that Argens does painstaking free. If you are looking for a good DB Management tool, Navicat, though pricey, is a great tool to use on the DB design work and managing of data.