8:00 – 4:30

• Had a long discussion with Mike about form input and building a more customized query.
• Thinking about making the query like what Lance and I were pondering on TUMMS – a Google-style interface(http://code.google.com/apis/base/docs/2.0/query-lang-spec.html)
  • a blank line would return all values in a table
  • the full or partial name of a column would return the values for the column (i.e. “bar” would return all the values of column “bar”, while “ba*” would return all the values for “bar” and “baz”.
  • the default search term (and the default) is “columns:”, which means return onlyt the values specified. The other option is “row”, which means to return all columns where the specified constraints are met. (“rows: foo[10]” would return all entries where the value for the columns “foo” is 10)
  • Brackets would constrain searches ( ba* [1..10] would return all entries of bar and baz that lie between 1 and 10 inclusive, while animals[kittens, puppies, ponies] would constrain the search to only those animals listed)
  • Searches could be combined so that ba*[1..10], date[1/1/1990..1/1/2000] would return all the values for bar and baz that are between 1 and 10 and were collected within the specified dates
  • The NOT operator “!” can be used to keep something from being returned (“rows: !ba*” will return the contents of the table without “bar” or “baz”, while “columns: !foo[10]” will return all vaues of foo that are not 10)
• Looks like there is a java API that supports this: (http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/dev/dsl_intro.html). Also, there is a nice video overview here: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization. It’s not quite what’s specified above, but it’s close, and it’s got MySQL support. Going to look more deeply tomorrow.
• Another useful link on same: http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/05/18/using-google-spreadsheets-as-a-databace-with-the-google-visualisation-api-query-language/