More on appadmin

appadmin is not intended to be exposed to the public. It is designed to help you by providing an easy access to the database. It consists of only two files: a controller “appadmin.py” and a view “appadmin.html” which are used by all actions in the controller.

The appadmin controller is relatively small and readable; it provides an example of designing a database interface.

appadmin shows which databases are available and which tables exist in each database. You can insert records and list all records for each table individually. appadmin paginates output 100 records at a time.

Once a set of records is selected, the header of the pages changes, allowing you to update or delete the selected records.

To update the records, enter an SQL assignment in the Query string field:

title = 'test'

where string values must be enclosed in single quotes. Multiple fields can be separated by commas.

To delete a record, click the corresponding checkbox to confirm that you are sure.

appadmin can also perform joins if the query contains a SQL condition that involves two or more tables. For example, try:

db.image.id == db.post.image_id

web2py passes this along to the DAL, and it understands that the query links two tables; hence, both tables are selected with an INNER JOIN. Here is the output:

If you click on the number of an id field, you get an edit page for the record with the corresponding id.

If you click on the number of a reference field, you get an edit page for the referenced record.

You cannot update or delete rows selected by a join, because they involve records from multiple tables and this would be ambiguous.

In addition to its database administration capabilities, appadmin also enables you to view details about the contents of the application’s cache (at /yourapp/appadmin/cache) as well as the contents of the current request, response, and session objects (at /yourapp/appadmin/state).

appadmin replaces response.menu with its own menu, which provides links to the application’s edit page in admin, the db (database administration) page, the state page, and the cache page. If your application’s layout does not generate a menu using response.menu, then you will not see the appadmin menu. In that case, you can modify the appadmin.html file and add {{=MENU(response.menu)}} to display the menu.