[pmwiki-users] SelectQuery development: database records as pages?

[Ben Stallings]

Hi, folks.  I'm starting to work on version 2.0 of SelectQuery, as laid 
out in http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/SelectQuery#plans .  Pico 
offered some suggestions there about how I might piggyback on the 
existing markup rather than creating new markup, and I'm going to give 
that my best shot.

Pico also wrote,
"Ok, now, to go off the deep end, something just occurred to me and I'll 
just say it, even though it may make no sense. What if you could create 
a recipe that fooled PmWiki into treating your MySQL structures as 
PmWiki's own structures? A database might be a wiki (or Wiki Field), a 
table a group, a record a page, and columns could be PageVariables or 
these new definition structures that Pm is working on using to create 
some kind of on-the-fly variables that can be used like PageVariables in 
pagelists."

To be honest, I haven't used pagelists yet.  I'm going to go read up on 
them now.  But my gut reaction to this idea is that database information 
is fundamentally more structured than wiki information, and rightly 
so... my purpose in writing SelectQuery and UpdateForm was to use the 
wiki as a *front end* for the data, not to actually bring the data into 
the wiki.  I have this creeping suspicion that if I treat the data like 
wiki information it will get corrupted somehow.  Maybe I just don't know 
enough about pagelists yet.

I'd like a second opinion from someone who knows more about what 
pagelists can do... would it be useful to do what Pico is suggesting? 
Or would it open a whole new can of worms?  Thanks in advance.  --Ben