Basic Concepts

Whereas most web applications allow you to work with tables only, the SimpleWebFront extends this concept and has support for simple views.

A view in SWF's notion is similiar to the views you might know from sql. Basically a SWF-view is defined as a select SELECTCLAUSE from table where WHERECLAUSE where the user can specify the selectclause and whereclause. A whereclause doesn't include a GROUP BY-construct.

A view in SWF is thus not the same as a view in sql, since (usually) a view in sql can be defined by any legal select-statement, whereas an SWF-view always has the above syntax. So basically an SWF-view is confined to a single table, but this is not fully true because some sort of joins are implicitly allowed. We will cover that in the next section.

The limitation of one table per view is primarily necessary to allow the user to update and delete data records in all views. We often call the table that the view is primarily based on Main-Table to avoid confusion with other (join-) tables.