Author: okohll

On its fourth anniversary, portalBase has been released under a GPL open source license. portalBase is a web based industrial strength platform for business application development. It’s used to rapidly prototype and develop data entry and reporting applications that work over the internet or a local network. Our vision was to create a product that…

We’ve polished the mobile version of portalBase – to try it out head straight to www.gtportalbase.com/mobile You can view reports, summaries and records. Editing may come in a future version, depending on whether users feel this would be useful functionality or not. Tip: If you use portalBase to store all of your company contacts, as…

Document version control is now available automatically to all files uploaded to portalBase. Whenever a new file is uploaded into a particular record, the file that was there (if any) is archived. Archived files are available to view and download in the ‘view’ tab. The edit tab only shows the current file, as archived files…

All modern software needs to be able to act on shared data with third party applications. This is especially true in the situations in which portalBase is commonly used, for example where it is a rapid development environment for creating applications to supplement legacy or hard-to-alter core software. You rarely get full value out of data…

The ability to filter data is one of the things that makes portalBase really powerful. Searching and filtering is quite easy but many users tend to stick with basic filters. This release of version 2.2 adds some more options so now’s a good time to write a quick tutorial by example. For those who want to…

Recently some work with a UK Sector Skills Council has involved investigating tag clouds for visualising database content. We thought what better way to test out some ideas than to rapidly prototype the database structure with portalBase and plug in a facility for visualising a cloud of words from data in it? We quickly did this…

GT portalBase is now compatible with Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer with the release of version 2.0! In other news, field names and descriptions can be edited by clicking on them in the ‘fields’ tab of a table. Along with the  drag and drop field re-ordering from the previous release, this makes schema editing…

This release addresses a number of items to improve input and output of large amounts of data, both from the schema design and end user points of view Importing  Metadata: fields such as creator and creation date are set for every imported record Bugfixes to the import routine – portalBase should deal with Excel-generated CSV…

Over the past few months, many minor changes have been released to address particular requirements, but this major release draws together a number of features. With the database and server components solid and high performance, this release focusses on the user interface. We’ve had UI specialists working on specific areas and the results are described…

New features Simple joins – life is now simpler for report creators: the system guides you when collating data from multiple sources into one report. Simple, context sensitive options are given e.g. when editing a contacts report, ‘join contacts to addresses’ may be offered. A knowledge of SQL principles is no longer necessary to create…