This document describes how to make a new database in TB Wiki.

TB Wiki was designed specifically to make this as easy as possible, using
regular wiki files as the records for the database.  This page is intended
to be a quickstart guide to setting up a simple database.  For complete
documentation, see [[DocTables]]

Table Type [edit section]

== Table Type ==
First, determine the table type - single file or multi-file.

You can edit the database in a single file, or have a database consist of
multiple files.  If the records are large, and have lots of free-form text,
it is usually better to put them into separate files.

single-file [edit section]

== single-file ==
For a single file database, just create a page to hold the table of data,
and start a table in TB wiki inline table format:

like so:
{{{
{{{!Table:contacts
||name||address||phone||
||Tim||123 Main St.||555-5555||
||Frank||456 State Ave.||666-6666||
} }}
}}}

multi-file [edit section]

=== multi-file ===
For a multi-file database, you need to decide on a page prefix to use
for the data files.  Each record of the database will reside on it's
own page in the wiki, and you can use a Table processor to collect
them into a view of the data.

Let's say you create a contacts database, and use "contacts_" as the 
file prefix. Specify this with a "source_spec=contacts_.*"
(''Note the '.' in the wildcard for the page name'')
Each file in the database has a single record from the database
in TB wiki name-attr format (these are referred to as attribute files).

The following files might be defined:

"contact_1" would have the following content:
{{{
record=1
name=Tim
address=123 Main St.
phone=555-5555
description="""you could put
a mult-line description here"""
}}}

"contact_2" would have the following content:
{{{
record=2
name=Frank
address=456 State Ave.
phone=666-6666
}}}

Note that not every record needs to define every field

''Note that not every record needs to define every field''

Then, create a separate page to have a view of the table, like so:

"Contacts", would have the following content:
{{{
{{{!Table:contacts
source_spec=contact_.*
cols=record_id:name:address:phone:description
sortby=name:alpha
} }}
}}}