RadDB: Storing and viewing test data

Development on my equipment database has slowed down a bit partly because of being busy at work and partly because the database files on my home computer keep getting corrupted for some reason and I haven’t bothered to figure out why or fix it yet.

The equipment tracking part does pretty much everything I need now (still a few things to take care of), so my latest efforts have been on trying to get the test data locked in my spreadsheets into the database.

I started off using the PhpSpreadsheet package (which is still under development), but I found a lot of what was in the documentation wouldn’t work. I ended up going to the older PHPExcel package instead. Using this made it relatively easy to create some Laravel Artisan commands that pick out the test data from my spreadsheets and stick them into the database. Now I can batch add data to the database using a simple shell script. One problem with the current commands is that they won’t work with older version of my spreadsheets yet because the locations of some of the data has changed over time. Not sure I’m too worried about that yet. They also don’t handle problems very gracefully yet. Something to work on later perhaps.

The DB schema for the test data is still being worked on, but I think I’ve got something that will let me pick out data for an individual survey, as well as show a time series from a specific test for a given machine.

Current works in progress are views to display the test data. I’ve got a few done, but still have a bunch more to do.

I love how easy doing all of this has been with Laravel.