ZDataQueryKit - Query Databases Without Programming Aims: The aim of this product is to allow people who are not familiar with SQL (Or at least are not experts) to produce complex SQL queries from any combination of Zope data sources. Objects: **ZVisualQuery** -- Visually design a ZSQLMethod ZSQLMethods are powerful Zope tools for querying databases that use the popular 'SQL' language. This is a complex language which can take many years to learn properly. ZVisualQuery does away with all that! As long as you know what tables you want to extract data from, and how the tables relate to each other (This is often documented with the database) you can extract data without the effort of writing and debugging potentially complex SQL statements. **ZDataCombiner** -- Visually combine data from _different sources_ *"The sales figures are in MySQL, the exchange rates are in PostgreSQL, and the personnel data is in Oracle, how can I write a single query that will conbine all this data?"* - The answer is, of course, you can't! BUT now you can do the next best thing! With ZDataCombiner you can take data from _any_ group of Zope datasources and combine them into a single datasource for other objects to query. As long as your datasources have, or can be given, common (Often called 'key') fields, you can combine the data from any set of Zope datasources and use it as though it was a normal ZSQLMethod (Or ZVisualQuery)! **ZReportTool** -- Visually create simple and complex tabular reports Once you have your data, you need to display it. This is where you need a DTMLMethod, and you start getting ready to write complex **<dtml-in ...>** commands, right? **WRONG**! Now with ZReportTool, you can simply select the datasource you want to use, select which columns to display, you can group by columns, and even sum numeric columns. Hit save and you have a report - Top to bottom, with no programming! And a special treat for people with XMLKit installed: **ZVisualODBCClient** -- Visually design an XMLODBCClient query The latest version of my XMLKit product http://www.zope.org/Members/haqa/XMLKit provides the ability to query an ODBC Socket Server from Zope. This, finally, allows Zope running on any platform to query Microsoft ODBC Databases on a Windows PC. ZVisualODBCClient does for XMLODBCClient what ZVisualQuery does for ZSQLMethod - It allows query designing without SQL programming. The output from the method is still compatible with that produced by a ZSQLMethod, and the objects that call the query can't even tell the difference! If this sounds interesting, you can find it at http://www.zope.org/Members/haqa/ZDataQueryKit NOTE: This is a first release, although the code has been tested, and is marked as stable, it might contain bugs. Enjoy Adrian... -- Adrian Hungate All views expressed in this email are those of the whole world, however some people don't realise this yet.