Chapter 11. CRUD Applications and More

In a number of applications, the primary objective of the application is to allow a user to perform create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations on the underlying data. The underlying data itself could be stored in some persistent store such as a relational database.

The process of creating two different CRUD applications is quite similar and involves similar types of complexity. Therefore it has been a quest among developers to automate the task of creating such applications.

CRUD applications often involve a list view of the collection of items and a form view of the details of each individual item in this collection. In current times, value additions on top of these simple CRUD views and operations has led to the emergence of the following:

• Management of the collections, where modifications are synchronized, in the list view as multiple users access and manipulate data

• Auto-population of model objects

• Introspection of available services and wiring up of service operations as CRUD methods

• Analytical processing of data, including structuring of data in hierarchical structures

• Charting and graphing of data for useful visual renderings

In this chapter, I will start with basic CRUD and demonstrate how such an application can be generated. Then I will illustrate a few of the advanced features that go beyond simple CRUD.