I'm a fan a Drupal for organizing "large text blocks" -- pages in a book, forums etc. But it seems like Drupal doesn't offer much of a way to handle "denser", smaller chunks of info that you'd find in a database.
One thing I really like about Ruby on Rails and Catalyst (http://catalyst.perl.org/) is their ability to handle database CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) and automatically map URI's to actions. I'm no MVC expert, but here the URI is acting as a Controller, calling the backend Model via method calls and parameters listed in the URI.
Here's an example in Catalyst :
Matches URI to any regular expression.
– Below code maps to http://localhost/item23/order42
package MyApp::C::Whatever;
sub foo : Regex('^item(\d+)/order(\d+)$') {
my ( $self, $c ) = @_;
...
}
My question is how can I do this in Drupal?? For example, let's say I want to keep track of my customers. I want to show a table of all users in a given state, city and zip code. I want a search-engine-friendly URI like this :
http://company.com/customers/colorado/boulder/80302
This would pull up a table showing customers in Boulder, CO, 80302. It would be flexible so that if someone just entered http://company.com/customers/colorado then they'd get all the customers in Colorado.
I thought about using Drupal's "path alias" module to "hard-code" all these URI's, but that seems inflexible and too kludgy. Maybe Flexinode could be used, but that doesn't really seem to be good for the case where I have "dense" data in an existing complex relational schema.
Any suggestion on how to do this in Drupal would be appreciated! Again, I like Drupal's ability to handle large "chunks" of text, Drupal's look, and Drupal's other goodies like authentication etc. -- I just also want something along the lines of RoR or Catalyst to help with CRUD and querying.
Thanks,
David
hedge funds
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