HowTo make a new database
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]
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]
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]
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
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 } }}