Nice Database GUI for Lots of Text I am designing a workflow processing system. I have many (hundreds) of workflows that in many cases are variants of each other and have related characteristics.
In the beginning development stages I need to document these workflows in a way that less-technical personnel can interface with. They break down their usage scenario and document it all in one place, the dev team will go through later and write code to implement their descriptions.
All I need to do is make a giant spreadsheet with each row containing a single workflow specification, with columns such as &quot;Inputs&quot;, &quot;Outputs&quot;, &quot;Process Description&quot;, and &quot;Implementation Status.&quot;
The Process Description field will contain several paragraphs and ordered lists describing the potentially intricate process and any nuances/gotchyas in human readable form.
Typing all of this information into an Excel spreadsheet is tedious and people keep hitting Enter instead of Shift+Enter. Reading it requires expanding the row or column dimensions, which makes scrolling through to quickly check the status intractable. Keeping the dimensions small makes entering data hard. Cutting and pasting blocks of text to break apart and reorganize the descriptions is...you guessed it, beyond unintuitive.
Has anyone come up with a solution with a good UI that can store information like this? And has a collapse-all/expand-all toggle?
Maybe I should roll-my-own database-backed web app...Is anyone interested in working with me to develop this as a product?
Of less importance but still kind of pretty important, is the relationships. For example Workflow 302 might use the same inputs and outputs as 303, and the process description needs only a few, very critical, words to be changed.
I feel like MS Access would be along the lines of what I'm looking for to potentially support data relationships; however once again being able to type a few nicely formatted paragraphs or a page of text within one cell needs to be a painless process.
Thank you for any suggestions!
The data itself is a very simple data problem, and any modern database system will work just fine (though I recommend staying away from MS Access just because it's antiquated as a database system nowadays).
The actual problem you're trying to solve is a UI one, which you'll want to likely provide a rich text editor for the end users to type their instructions (ProcessDescription) into. This can be accomplished easily with any desktop or web application, which there are a multitude of rich text editors out there for (dependent on whichever front-end / back-end stack you choose). The rich text editor will usually store the formatting of the text with special code (most times HTML tags or something similar are used) behind the scenes from the end user, which will be completely digestible by your database without any special extra work needed to store it and recall it in the same format.