Drupal as an interface for users to Add/Edit/Search a database I have a friend who wants to set up a site for an NPO that basically allows users to search and edit a data table with about 100 fields. My solution (being from the MS world) would be to set up a simple MVC.Net site which pretty much auto-generates pages and forms for searching and editing rows. The technology the NPO has set up however, is Drupal 7 running on Apache with a MySQL instance floating around in there.

I've searched Drupal modules and poked around with things like Data which seemed fit for constructing a UI that searches and modifies DB tables, but didn't see any way to make it work. This seems like it would be a pretty common problem people want to solve though. Can anyone propose some appropriate tools/modules for setting up such a site?



That's my question, but if you are looking for some additional information about what they're trying to accomplish, here's some relevant details:


The data we want to kick off the site with is about 300 rows in an excel spreadsheet. Something supporting a bulk data import would be preferable, but isn't required. I've already converted the data into an SQL db, so if we can simply point a module to the database, that would be great too.
Most of these are plain text fields, some are numeric, some are paragraph format (with line breaks). Rather than just text boxes for everything though, while editing and searching on certain fields, they want to present the user with a drop-down list of available values.
On the same vein as having drop-down lists for certain fields, forms that supports some customization (such as custom data validation routines) would probably be handy.
I have a grand total of about 10 hours of experience working with Drupal, but I'm comfortable with installing and configuring modules, and have ssh access to the server.
Start off with something like this:


Build Content Types for the data you want to represent. Remember that relationships in Drupal are different than the DB world and are joined with things like http://drupal.org/project/relation or http://drupal.org/project/entity_reference
Use a module like http://drupal.org/project/migrate or http://drupal.org/project/feeds to import your data and map it into your nodes. Feeds will handle what you're doing here pretty handily but if you need more advanced manipulation on the way in, Migrate is the way to go. This can basically run on some kind of cron/batch to continue a "sync" of your data.
Use http://drupal.org/project/views to build reports of your data


If you need to manipulate the data tables directly, that's not exactly what Drupal is built for. It's more than a Front End. It's a full CMF.