Lesson
10 - Tablemaker - generating reports
Tools and Techniques
Sometimes you'd like to see the values for just a subset of fields from
the records you have selected, ordered in a particular manner. In other
words, you'd like some kind of tabular report of the information. This
can be done using Tablemaker. Tablemaker is available for all databases,
and in this lesson we'll go through the steps required to create user-defined
tables.
What is Tablemaker?
Up until now, when we have accessed data from the
databases, you got entire records, and you saw all the available fields
in these records. While it is possible to look at multiple records to look
at in one window (by holding down the CTRL as you select them), this format
isn't conducive to quickly scanning a particular field's value across all
the records. Tablemaker is a tool you can use to generate customized tabular
reports containing just the subset of fields you want to look at. These
reports can then be downloaded to your computer. You construct the table
definition column by column, and for each column you define a query which
restricts the data to be included in the report. Your final report can
contain columns coming from many different record types. Tablemaker is
available in the same places that you would select Query Builder or Query
by Example.
When you build a table definition, there will
be buttons at the top that let you add/delete columns. You can generate
an html table, in which data items are hyperlinked back into the database,
or a text table, which is just straight text. Some of the databases have
pre-defined tables, which the curator has created and can tell you about.
If you know the names assigned to these tables, you can load them and execute
them (or use them as a starting point to create your own table).
Example 10.1 - The following example continues
the explanation of Tablemaker and lets you try it out for yourself.
TreeGenes
If you have a TreeGenes Database comment or question contact Kim
Marshall, Curator.
That should have given you a taste for making reports. If you'd like
to learn more, and try some more complicated reports involving multiple
classes of data, try the next two examples.
SoyBase
If you have a SoyBase Database comment or question contact David
Grant, Curator.
RiceGenes
If you have a RiceGenes Database comment or question contact Angela
Baldo, Curator.
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