Part 4: Displaying some data

Now we will actually show some information stored in the database.
The following image shows a schema of all the tables in our database:

The database schema is from DBPTK, and is found by clicking “BROWSE” in the database overview

The table film looks interesting, so we will click that to view it:



Our first task will be to show the title and description of every film in a table.

1. To do this, we have to start by defining a new table for our view. We do this by adding a <table> tag in our XML template:

<views>
    <view>
        <name>Den beste visningen</name>
        <table>                    
        </table>
    </view>
</views>

1. Within the <table> tag, there are 4 required tags we need to specify. These are <name>, <title>, <primarykey> and <fields>.
   The purpose of these tags is as follows:
   

XML tag	Value
<name>	The name of the table in the database we want data from. As we are getting data from the table film, the value will be film
<title>	The name that will be displayed above our table. This can be set to anything you want.
<primarykey>	A primary key is a column that has a unique value for every row in a table. For the film table the unique column is film_id, so we have to set the primary key to film_id
<fields>	This is a list of columns we want to show data from. The list is comma-separated, so because we want to show data from the columns title and description, we have to set fields to title, description

1. Update the XML template file with the required tags:

...
<table>
    <name>film</name>
    <title>Den beste tabellen</title>
    <primarykey>film_id</primarykey>                    
    <fields>title, description</fields>
</table>
...

Some parts of the XML file that were not changed in this step have been omitted.

1. If we open our view now, it should show a table with columns for titles and descriptions.
   
   

Now we have a fully working table, and are ready to learn some more advanced techniques!